


Do Not Disturb

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Source Codes [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Azkaban, Consent Issues, Dubious Ethics, Dubious Morality, Evil Dumbledore, M/M, Remus Goes to Azkaban, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Wolfsbane, horrible angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-19
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-16 00:40:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 64,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7245277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Everybody is gone but you and you are mostly gone and every day you get goner..."</p><p>In 1993, Remus Lupin figures out how to escape from Azkaban.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> nota bene: i am serious about the warnings on this story, and also i definitely can add more. if you think there's an element of this story i should tag / warn for, that i have left out of the existing tags, please let me know! in particular, the "consent issues" tag (i would call it "consent through misinformation") refers to events of chapter 7. however, no consent issues take place between the two main characters.  
> please hit me up if you have questions or concerns or if you want to call me out on something. i'm [here](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/) on tumblr.

“Hey, well my name is called Disturbance  
I’ll shout and scream I’ll kill the king  
I’ll rail at all his servants” 

— Rolling Stones “Street Fighting Man,” 1968

\--

**Azkaban**  
_ January 1993 _

The body and the blood of the man was in the door watching and the sliver of his face in the rusted metal of it was stern and cold suffused in a pale blue-grey light. By this juncture — twelve years — he was accustomed to hallucinations though usually they were people he wanted to see. The searing bitter blue eye disappeared from the window and the grate in the bottom of the door through which they would deliver his food and water once daily opened with its sound — as grating and as horrible as anything else. Just inside the cell a long and spidery white hand beringed in jewels and gold at the end of a spangled sleeve placed a bone chalice steaming with something poison red. Then it drew away again and back into the window came the eye. 

“What’s this,” Remus asked. He did not remember the last time he had spoken beyond a whisper to himself and his voice was like a shattering. 

“It’s a potion in development,” Dumbledore said. His voice had lost the warmth in it — 1971, at the door of the Lupins’ cottage in Castle Cary. I think we can come to a conclusion that is safe for everyone. “Wolfsbane. Quite a clever brew — primarily Monkshood but there are some other key additions.” 

“I’m not committing suicide.” 

“Yes, yes, you said that at trial. On the contrary this won’t kill you though it was brewed rather as a mistake by an Estonian hitman after a bounty on a Belarus packleader. When it did not work as expected he sold me the recipe. We’ve done some refinement but the Ministry mandates — increased testing. Indeed this could rather be a pivotal moment for the international werewolf community.” 

He was watching the chalice steam in the shaft of sea light through the slender window at the back of his cell opening on the brutal wind and the endless crepuscule of grey. From where he sat he could smell it and it smelled like a corpse rotting. “What’s it do.” 

Dumbledore’s teeth glinted when he smiled. “Not much can be done as far as I have researched to combat the physical symptoms or reactions as it were but this will help with — as they say, the ravening bloodlust.” 

The sound that escaped him could perhaps be called a laugh. “Right.” 

“It turns off — silences the animal. You will just be you — your mind, your self — inside a wolf. If it works as we have brewed it.” 

It was altogether impossible, Remus thought. There was no way. And with monkshood? He had long resigned himself to this trappedness inside his body. “What if it doesn’t.” 

“Well we will just have to try it again until it does.” 

“You can’t just test experimental poison on me because I’m — ”

“On the contrary Remus, of course I can, and of course you will take it; I would like very much not to have to force you. I would think the prospect of maintaining your rationality during your transformations would very much appeal to you after — well, after all that has happened.” 

Impossible, impossible, Remus reminded himself; impossible, monkshood — sticky flowers lacerated finely slid with a gloved finger in sugary traces down the blade of a knife into a bubbling potion whereupon it turned a deep seductive purple and it was called, some draught of eternal something… A poison of many varied uses, the potions master had explained; it could kill right off in one dose if measured correctly or it could be doled out the way Muggles sometimes used arsenic to kill one’s enemies over an extended period so as to diffuse blame. Why had he even told them all this information was completely beyond Remus who noticed how Sirius glanced (he thought surreptitiously) toward Snape and then toward his cousin who were working together at a simmering cauldron in the back corner. Its contents were reflected — deep, psychedelic, suffocating — in Bellatrix’s eyes. He felt Sirius shudder where their elbows were touching. 

Something strange was happening. Usually his brain would run faster down the track to death in this place and when it ran as ever to Sirius it either made him want to eviscerate himself with his own hands or it was snatched away with seeming claws. He looked to Dumbledore in the cell door window — the grey-blue light — 

He stood (his knees and hips cracked) and when he did his vision swam with hunger. He was obliged to lean a moment against the wall. He felt Dumbledore study him as he long ago had — for outward signs of the creature. Things he knew: he was barefoot and two of his toes were black with cold. The scars and tattoos on his hands and feet and collar and face alone were visible. His hair had been cut and his beard, he thought he remembered recently but he could not be certain. When this had been done he had been given a fresh uniform laundered and mended thoughtfully at the elbows and knees by volunteer witches in Edinburgh. On the first day it had smelled like lavender and Earl Grey before the stink of the place had seeped into it and for an hour he had pressed his face to the window where in the sea breeze sometimes he could remember wondering why it made him feel like weeping. It had been a long time since he had seen his reflection and he wondered if he still had one. Sometimes he tried to imagine what he looked like based on feeling. Other times he could not even summon the fortitude to conceptualize himself inside a body. 

At the door he could tell Dumbledore had a Patronus with him because he could feel his mind sharpening out of the black despair by minimal increments and he could almost feel — with a minute wash of nausea after over a decade — the twisted golden thread of his magic resurface in his fingertips and behind his eyes. He was close enough to Dumbledore even through the door he could smell incense and Darjeeling. There was a tiny fleck of unidentifiable food in the old man’s beard. He met Remus’s eyes with the cool certainty that had possessed him in 1981 in the Ministry — from his juror’s seat in the amphitheater just below the dais packed as it was with international reporters who had risked life and limb and assorted sanctions to come to Britain and the curious and the rubbernecked lookers-on and half the staff of Hogwarts and everyone and their mother who worked at the Ministry and notably not Sirius — and there was just enough silver in the iron collar and cuffs to burn. 

“I’ll take it if you — I want to know about some things,” he said. 

He felt himself yearning for the strange warmth of the glowing animal he could not see but he could feel it through the door and its gentleness and light suffuse through his mind. Dumbledore saw it. “What sorts of things.” 

“I want to know about how Harry is and Sirius — ” 

“You forsook your claim on both of them.” The thing was that he hadn’t. Or perhaps he had on Sirius but that was only because — but he had enough self-possession about him now to keep his mind from that road. He opened his mouth to attempt arguing the point but Dumbledore stopped him with a held-up finger. “Rest assured I have not forgotten your pathetic defense back in ’81.” 

“I’ll take the potion,” Remus said, “I’ll take it as long as you want if you answer ten questions for me. And you can say no to — to two of them, deal?” 

The glint in Dumbledore’s eyes was eerily similar to the one he always had on when Remus and Sirius and James and the rat had been called to his office to answer for a prank Dumbledore clearly wished he would’ve thought up himself. “Three,” he said, “three, and that’s a deal.” 

“We can’t shake hands on it so I want your word.” 

“Fine,” said Dumbledore, “you have my word.” 

Remus crouched and lifted the chalice. It was strangely heavy and so close to the silver tendrils of smoke his stomach turned at the smell of it. Rich mulchy death. Death already beset by mushrooms. 

“As we have currently conceptualized it there are three courses of this potion to be taken the three days preceding each full moon. The staff have been instructed to deliver courses two and three with your meals and be certain they are consumed. I will return the evening after next to observe.” 

_The staff_ , as though they were not fifty compass points of black-hole draining hell summoned from nightmare. “Who’s _we_.” 

“Severus has been assisting me in development.” 

If Snape had known the course was for Remus it was certainly poisoned, he thought. 

“It’s best to just take it like a shot of Old Ogden’s,” Dumbledore advised. 

So he did. He had tasted nothing worse in his life especially after nearly twelve years eating only porridge and twice a week a block of flavorless soy protein supplement to keep his muscles from atrophying — the vivid horrible bloodness of it, the iron and the burning spice, like a mouthful of pepper, shoving at his nose and his eyes; his whole self rebelled against it such that he even felt the other inside him screaming. He turned away from the door and clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from vomiting. “Do try to keep it down,” Dumbledore said. 

He had to sit. His muscles were spasming and his heart had picked up to what felt like double pace and it was slamming skips and it hurt to breathe and his stomach had turned upside down and it had gone from the typical interminable soul-deep coldness to his skin burning burning burning cold sweat slick up his back and his neck and in his hair. He pressed himself into the corner against the cold stone with his forehead on his knees. It was about twenty minutes before the worst of it passed and he could look up again without feeling faint; when he did Dumbledore had gone from the door. Two of them were clustered there but when they saw a sign of life from him they scuttled away like crabs. 

\--

That first time, it did not work. Dumbledore was in the door with a few unfamiliar human faces all cast in the soft blue-grey glow of their Patronuses to keep the Dementors at bay. After the initial tachycardia now he felt his heart beating almost too slowly. Everything was swimming and he burned. He couldn’t even sit so he lay in the floor pressing his face to the stone. He knew if he didn’t strip he would rend his uniform to shreds in his transformation and it wouldn’t be replaced for weeks but he couldn’t stand them looking at him. At last it was the fever heat that drove him to it. They were jostling in the door for the sight of him — skin, scars, burns, black ink and blood. Fenrir Greyback’s twenty seven-year-old bites and his fifteen-year-old ones, both of which had been presented at his trial as proof of some conjecture. Perversely he wished the creatures would come back instead. He turned away from the faces into the window watching at the long low grey horizon for the moon and he closed his eyes and as he had done for a decade now he tried to remember a single good memory because he knew they had existed. 

London — sometimes there was a basement or they would go together to the Shack where the bed was molding and everything was torn and there were bloodstains on the floor from long ago. These memories were not quite good because in them he always hurt. Desperately, the animal, beating his chest. They would sit together so close he could feel Sirius breathing on his cheek and he had clenched his own hand in Sirius’s hair which was very long and thick and cool and his breath was coming out like sobs. Sirius’s heartbeat like a second in his chest with his own. Sirius would be saying all these things, Moony, Moony Love. Even when Remus had thought and he had known Remus had thought — 

This was — he bit his lip until he tasted it split. 

In the years before sometimes he had forgotten what he was until he felt his bones start to move on him. In the door they quieted when they saw him begin to stretch. I’m supposed to keep my head, he remembered; he tried to stay in it, he kept his grip on it as long as he could manage, but at the end when it snatched away he was almost grateful. 

\--

When he woke up Dumbledore was in the window. He had magicked the musty and ratty wool blanket from the corner over Remus for his privacy and a modicum of warmth. “It didn’t work,” Remus tried to say; neither did his voice. 

“Of course it didn’t,” Dumbledore replied; he was tired, and he spoke tightly. He watched with a vague interest while Remus sat gingerly and inspected the damage — not nearly as bad as usual. Having Dumbledore and the Ministry men with Patronuses by the door instead of the Dementors who customarily watched the wolf throw itself around the small dark room with a savage sucking glee had left Remus more clear-headed than he thought he had been since his incarceration. 

“I usually hurt myself a lot more,” Remus told him. His voice came back on _more_. 

“So they’ve told me,” said Dumbledore. “It’s, the heartbeat was so negligible you could not remain conscious.” 

“Negligible?” 

“Fifteen or so beats in a minute. Thankfully we had a mediwizard on hand.” 

Remus hugged his knees to his chest and turned to the sea. His window was Southeast-facing, he realized, perhaps for the first time, which was why he never saw land. Seafog thick and possessing as blood. 

“It’s a matter of tinkering with the measurements,” said Dumbledore. 

“Right.” 

“Don’t look so dejected. We know what constitutes a killing dose and what doesn’t.” 

“For a — ” he hesitated. “For a human maybe you do.” 

“Do you think you’re the first we have tested this on?” 

Remus turned to the doorway. He was so unaccustomed to being able to think so quickly about anything but his own guilt. The rush of understanding was not far from what he imagined it felt like to drown. Dumbledore’s eyes twinkled and thoughtfully, measuredly, horribly, he smiled. 

“Are you going to ask me your questions now or did you want to save them for the next time we see one another?” 

He swallowed his bruised and hoarse invective and he swallowed, how could you? Who are you? He said, “Is Harry safe?” 

“Yes,” Dumbledore said, “we have taken every precaution.” 

Where is he, Remus wondered, is he with Sirius? He bit his tongue. Dumbledore would refused to answer those and besides other knowledges were more important. “Does he know about — about me, about this?” 

“He is completing his second year at Hogwarts. He knows — only select of the circumstances of his parents’ deaths.” 

Which meant he could not have been with Sirius which meant — 

“He does not — it is likely he has never heard your name in his conscious life.” 

“Oh, good,” Remus said. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Good, thank God.” 

He was entirely unaccustomed to the realization of something almost good. A breathless and impossible warmth. Like a far corner of the eternal darkness lifted. A temporary lightening of the blind squeezing black weight on his chest and in his mind. 

“Another question?” Dumbledore asked from the door. 

He hadn’t yet thought of any more. “I’m saving the rest.” 

“So be it.” In the window Remus watched him check the moonwatch he had always worn, with at least three other similar watches tracking unknown celestial bodies, under his left sleeve. “I’ll return with a new course in twenty-five days.” 

It would feel, like this whole endeavor heretofore had, like six eternities and also like the blink of an eye. When they came back they would have whatever refined measurement of poison for him to swallow three days over as his bones sharpened but they would also bring Patronuses and as such he would be able to think again. 

When he looked up again Dumbledore was gone from the window. The soft blue glow of whatever mystical animus fading in the cold slate hallway. Remus felt his mind wild and running running as fast as it could manage like some heretofore caged marathoner. He knew very soon — when they sensed they could return, when they were drawn — it would all be snatched from him except what they knew they could leave for purposes of his torture. He wondered how fresh he would seem to them now they had been kept from his cell almost twenty-four hours. For a long time now he had felt like a bloodless husk they had already drunk dry. Perhaps there was a single drop left to him now and they would fight each other over it. Unless by some miracle he could keep it to himself. 

As such the things Dumbledore had told him he pressed down as deep as he could and he wove together with the things he remembered: 

They understood their was a spy. Sirius had been spending time with his family. Information was leaked and Order folk died resultantly at moments of uncanny coincidence. Things were implied but unsaid. Remus tried to keep Sirius in their flat as best he could customarily with food and/or sex but he would leave while Remus slept and Remus would wake at dawn and smash a teacup or a record and go out and buy a new one to replace it and wait chain-smoking until Sirius came back. 

Dumbledore wanted Remus for James and Lily’s Secret Keeper and the ceremony was performed and then two weeks later after the Prewitts wound up dead in Shropshire whilst Sirius had gone to meet with the Edinburgh Blacks the ceremony was performed again, and Remus got blackout shitfaced drunk. 

Sirius would come back in the door ever the prodigal son and Remus would be waiting for him on the couch and the weight of the knowing was such that he couldn't even speak and Sirius would come to him and kneel between his legs and kiss his belly and the insides of his knees and Remus would have to cover his mouth very tightly with his hand to keep from screaming. And the scream, swallowed, he could taste like charcoal behind his teeth. 

He wished Sirius would just kill him and get it over with. He thought about asking. 

Now Harry was safe but he was not with Sirius though the ceremonials and paperwork of godfathership were likely more difficult to renege upon even than the Secret Keeper spells. He wondered how Dumbledore had spun it and then he wondered horribly and helplessly if Sirius was even still alive. As such it was that notion at the forefront of his mind when they returned to the door and stirred his misery up as they enjoyed in search of forgotten pieces like gleaners in an endless field. Like scavengers upon something very long dead. 

Sometimes he thought almost they had voices or they could put voices together out of every bad thing as though they could winnow through it all like puzzle pieces and select intelligently what fit: 

Everybody is gone but you and you are mostly gone and every day you get goner. You the breaker of everything you have ever touched. You a creature who deserves a cage. Half of each and fully nothing. The poison they have prepared for you is that mercy which you deserve. Do you not remember what you’ve done — do you not recall their evidence? Perhaps in the drinking of it you will find some false absolution. As the Greeks found in their poison hemlock. 

You can claim your technical innocence but in other courts you are guilty. Isn’t it funny that you rot for the murder at which you failed? 

You will never leave this place and even if you ever manage it you will never kill your master and you will never kill the rat

Kill the rat

Kill the rat

Kill the rat


	2. Chapter 2

**London**  
_ November 1981  _

Sirius heard from Minerva that Remus’s trial was being held at the Ministry and Apparated there post-haste despite the fact they had already confiscated his badge and changed his keycode and procured for him a Dreamless Sleep draught, forty-eight hours worth of unthinking bliss, that Dumbledore and Pomfrey alike had advised him to take straightaway. Milling about the Auror office when Sirius arrived attempting to do something about the mess of paperwork cast about in shock and jubilation and joyful abandonment was none other than Arthur Weasley. “Where’s the trial,” Sirius said without a greeting, voice cracking.

Arthur, for his part, did not so much as startle. Arthur who had walked in on the two of them in the hall closet at James’s over New Year’s. 

“Lowest level,” Arthur told him. As though he was telling Sirius where the coffee was. “Courtroom C.” He pressed his badge into Sirius’s hand and Sirius ran. He had not the patience for the elevator so he took the stairs two by two down down down so deep he thought he felt the air heat just so as if he approached hell. He had not slept in two or three days because whenever he found an hour to lie down and shut his eyes he had simply run through his memory on a loop unending to search for clues. The day previous he had asked to adopt the child, who had been placed with Lily’s relatives in Surrey. “His current placement is not temporary, Sirius,” Dumbledore had explained. He had gone into blood magic, the power of love, et cetera, and Sirius had felt his teeth grinding down inside his skull. For forty-eight hours now he had done naught but pace in hallways and plead cases he was told were impossible. 

He did not believe it — he did not believe Remus had done it — he did not believe Harry could be safer with other than him. 

On the lowest level he ran helter-skelter down the hallway toward the far door which was guarded by seemingly a full MLE squad in neatly pressed uniforms who had tightened their grip upon their wands when they heard the staircase door slam. 

“This trial is private,” said the squad leader. In the semidarkness the golden chevrons pinned to his breast looked almost sinister. Sirius recognized him as a Slytherin alumnus probably three or four years older who had won several awards for his potionmaking but had been a dismal Chaser, having likely paid his way onto the team. 

“It isn’t a _trial_ if it’s private,” Sirius said, out of breath; “I need to talk to Albus Dumbledore.” 

“He’s a juror. He can’t be interrupted.” 

“Aren’t jurors supposed to be impartial?” 

“This isn’t an American procedural drama,” said another of the squad. “This is a special circumstance.” 

“It’s hardly a — ”

“You aren’t impartial either, Black,” said the squad leader. His smile showed an uncomfortable amount of square and yellowish teeth. 

“I don’t need to go — I just need to talk to Dumbledore.” 

“Go and wait in his office with the rest of them,” someone said. 

“The prosecution’s witnesses are testifying presently,” said the squad leader, “and the jurors cannot be interrupted.” 

“The prosecution — who’s testifying?” 

“Confidentiality,” said another of the squad in an eerie singsong. He was quickly silenced by Sirius’s glare. What with the sleeplessness and the horror he was certain it could cut steel. 

“Who’s testifying.” 

“I wouldn’t want to know,” said the squad leader, “if I were you.” 

He had put all his teeth away but the smile still played cruelly around his narrow colorless lips. This whole time Sirius’s blood had been running pure adrenaline on him but he hadn’t been allowed to fight. And now someone else was picking one. It seemed altogether too good an excuse to pass up. 

“You look more feral than ever these days, Black,” said the squad leader. “So I suppose it’s fitting.” 

“What’s fitting.” 

The singsonger giggled and he kept giggling even when Sirius rounded on him, fists curling, a few spells jellying in the back of his throat. 

“I said what’s fitting.” 

Even then he thought he already knew what it was. 

“Brought him in this morning from Oslo didn’t they,” said the giggler. “Ravening madman wasn’t he.” 

“Not a man,” said the squad leader, with a kind of ruler snap in his voice, as a professor might correct a student. 

“Come the fuck out with it,” Sirius told them. He could feel one eye twitching. In the nervous silence he was certain that from inside he could hear a cold and bitter laughter echoing as in a canyon. He knew with a horrible eternal certainty if he threw the door open what he would see and he remembered how it had been when Remus came back from France — 

“I would go see a doctor at St. Mungo’s, mate,” said the giggler. “Get a good look taken at the Black family jewels.” 

Sirius lunged at him and bone and its blood casing cracked against the wall like something thrown. Of course there were about eight of them and by the time he made it out into the atrium most of the blood he had drawn was from his own knuckles. He spat blood at those two who had escorted him upstairs as a handful of upstairs guards hustled to grasp his arms and his shoulders and haul him outside bodily like a sack of potatoes. He was still screaming hoarsely with an expletive-heavy invective that reminded him disturbingly of his mother’s and he continued shouting after the grate slammed shut and he kicked at it with the heavy soles of his Doc Maartens until his ankle felt sore. He was alone then in the alley out back of the Ministry but for a single junkie who looked up at him with a vague sympathy. 

A chill passed up through Sirius and at the top of it he screamed — quietly like a stuck thing. Dry heaved thrice. Dusted himself off and healed his hurts with a bit of lazy magic and stumbled out into the sickly yellow streetlight in search of the nearest bar. 

\--

When he woke the dawn was slicing in painfully through a high barred window and he was still so drunk he thought at first that the floor was moving and he himself was being shipped to Azkaban — with Remus, instead of Remus. In Remus’s head. Had he killed that guard? Or had he done it all to begin with, or both? But he shut his eyes again against the wash of nausea and felt the room’s stasis. His face was pressed to cold tile which smelled like Muggle chemicals and burned at the corner of his mouth. 

It took him another ten minutes to sit in the spinning and when he did immediately he vomited. A Muggle hooker clutching her ratty feather boa tightly around herself against the chill in the room was watching him with a weary sympathy. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “You want a glass of water,” she asked in an egregious Cockney drawl. When he opened one eye, vaguely interested, she said, “Too fuckin bad, mate.” 

He laid on the floor again pressing his burning forehead to the tile. In another six eternities a Muggle policeman came to the cell door and Sirius, feeling brutally reckless, Oblivated him. If he had had his wits about him he would have been surprised and vaguely impressed that he had managed such magic without words and without a wand. Later he would think about it in full academic detail but now he felt rather like Warren Oates’ character in _Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia_. The policeman opened the cell door and Sirius and the hooker went out. She pressed against his side to keep him from collapsing. In his stomach there was a black hole opening upon the other one in his head and running between them was some wormhole current of spiraling despair. Like a Dementor inside his very soul. 

In the pale dawn he and the hooker sat on the curb and they each had a cigarette. She folded her knees in a ladylike way and rhythmically she scuffed the soles of her black ballet flats together. “Have you ever had sex with a werewolf,” Sirius asked her. 

“Can’t say that I have.” 

“Don’t bother.” 

She smiled showing a mouthful of crookedish teeth nicotine-yellow. “It can’t be all bad.” 

“Yes it can,” said Sirius, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes again against the rapidly compounding headache. “Oh, yes it can.” 

She put one spidery filament hand nervously against his back between the shoulderblades and he wondered if men ever hired her just to talk to. 

“I have to go speak to a man,” Sirius told her. 

“You might — well there’s an hourly hotel down the street I can show you to where you can sleep it off a little more.” 

“There isn’t time.” 

“Well can you get up without puking out your guts?” 

He tried to stand and immediately bent double again, hands on his knees, against the nauseous spinning. She had stood too with her hand braced still against his back like a marionette. He thought another spell entirely without meaning — one cribbed directly from _Marley McForley’s Guide to Ales, Whiskeys, Rums, Spirits, and the Morning After_ — and he felt the nausea and the static in his mind dissipate somewhat. He knew from experience this spell would last him about an hour, if that. 

“Where’s this hotel,” he asked the hooker, straightening up. 

“Three blocks down. I’ll walk you.” 

He was not entirely sure how he had gotten to this part of London which looked as though it were all condemned to be razed. He did not think he had ever been here before in his life and for a moment he wondered if he had dreamed it into being as he had felt for the last several days rather condemned to be razed. The hotel the hooker took him to looked like a drug den and/or the decaying mansion of a deranged eccentric. HOTEL ROME, said the chipping tile in the doorway. 

“Starla,” said the woman behind the counter upon sight of the hooker. “Who’s this?” 

“Needs a room,” said Starla. 

“Four hours should do it,” said Sirius. 

The woman behind the counter cocked an eyebrow at Starla. 

“Don’t look at me,” she said, “I’m leaving post-haste. Got an appointment in Knightsbridge.” From a coin purse tucked in a garter she paid for Sirius’s room. “My thanks for bailing me from the drunk tank.” 

He went gingerly upstairs on the wide marble staircase, each step bowled and smooth with use, past junkies passed out in the darkened corners of each landing, spiderwebbed windows, dawn milky white on the tile floor. His room was 4F; he went in, shut the door, splashed a handful of stinking metallic water on his face, Apparated. 

In 1979 after a series of bloody miscommunications Order members had been given special privileges to Apparate onto the Hogwarts grounds, though only directly to Dumbledore’s office. As such the man himself was sitting awake at his desk and he looked up with little surprise at the pop of Sirius’s Apparition. He did not even reach for his wand which lay beside that morning’s _Daily Prophet_ amongst an ecstasy of quills and parchment rolls. On the cover of the paper: _WEREWOLF TRAITOR EN ROUTE TO AZKABAN — NATION CELEBRATES_. Remus’s mugshot in which he looked handsome and confused. They had done some editing to the photograph because the scars across his face were larger and darker than Sirius remembered them and he had been looking at them for years. He had been kissing them and touching them at night while Remus slept. In the photograph Remus squinted at the flashes of light. His pupils changed sizes. He held his name and his casefile number on a chalkboard in his hands and he had bitten his nails halfway down the bed which was a habit Sirius had never seen. But of course it seemed now there were many habits of Remus’s that Sirius had never seen. Dumbledore folded the paper and put it down. “Mr. Black.” 

“Sir,” said Sirius. Everything he was going to have said had vacated his brain. As though the script had been plucked away. 

“The trial concluded perhaps six hours ago,” Dumbledore said, steepling his long fingers. “Mr. Lupin is on his way to Azkaban.” 

Then he said, “Why don’t you sit.” 

Sirius did. He had known he would be too late but it was still like — looking a basilisk in its reflected eyes. 

“I can tell a _finite crapula_ when I see it, Sirius.” 

“I tried to come to the trial.” 

“Yes, I heard from the MLE squad. Milton Robards will need reconstructive surgery on his nose.” 

Sirius ignored that and the smug rush of pride. “How can you call it a trial?” 

“How so do you mean?” 

“Did anyone testify in his defense?” 

“A trial doesn’t need witnesses on both sides.” 

“I would’ve done it,” said Sirius, “I would’ve.” 

“You are rather not impartial.” 

“Neither are you.” 

“What would you have said? Do you think it would have swayed a jury?” 

“It doesn’t matter.” 

“I wonder if you would’ve had the chutzpah to be frank about your relationship with Mr. Lupin in front of an entire room of Ministry officials including most of your former coworkers in the Auror Office and many of your relatives.” 

Of course he himself had wondered. If he would have — if he could have done it. If he could have said, Remus, yes, I know Remus, I have shared his bed since 1977, I know Remus inside and out. “I would’ve done it,” Sirius said again. 

“I’m sure,” said Dumbledore, but he didn’t sound it. 

“You wanted to put him away as fast as you could. It’s all very transparent. Hasty trial convened in minutes — your best evidence being a, a severed finger.” 

“The entire magical community of this nation has been calling for his execution. Really Azkaban is a mercy sentence.” 

“Is it really?” 

Dumbledore sighed. He removed his glasses and folded the arms of them which was always a sign that he was about to be rather brutal. That he was poised to speak as a man and as a genius wizard, aloof and cold, rather than with his headmasterly, gentle pedanticism. “I understand his guilt is a bitter pill for you to swallow, Sirius, but it would do you very much good.” 

“I don’t believe it,” said Sirius, “you can’t make me believe it.” 

“I can tell you that Fenrir Greyback testified under Veritaserum that Mr. Lupin had been working for him since his Hogwarts graduation.” 

Simply it could not be true. It could not because Sirius knew the truth about what had happened in 1965 and then later under Dumbledore’s own wishes in 1978 and yet horribly he was beginning to entertain it. 

“Furthermore Mr. Lupin himself admitted as such, under Veritaserum.” 

“Why do you pay any credence to such a monster?” 

“Why do you?” 

He wanted to sweep his arm across the desk and knock all the beautiful trinkets and antique scrying memorabilia onto the floor and he wanted to smash them to pieces and rip his head open and scream one wild banshee death scream that would end the whole world and he was certain for one perfect horrible moment that if he tried it he could do it. 

“And finally Sirius and you know I do hate to tell you this but even if you did manage to summon the courage to testify you were Mr. Lupin’s lover I doubt the jury could have given you much — credence, as you say, as Mr. Greyback testified to the same effect.” 

“Fuck,” Sirius said, without sound. “No.” 

“I am happy to show you Mr. Greyback’s complete testimony via Pensieve — ”

“That’s not necessary.” 

His voice was a half-voice non-voice that vibrated in his chest like a faraway bomb, or like thunder. Thunder over the lake at night — thunder in the narrow window above the bed. A cold shimmering death rattle he felt more than he heard over the persistent siren bell ringing in his ears. 

Between them the air seethed electric and either Sirius’s hangover spell was wearing off or more likely he was about to be physically sick over the other thing. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes again against the rapidly surmounting headache and in the colorless black bursting neon in his skull he remembered — Remus, his skin, night. The very tenuous beginning braiding of the thing when their every sexual encounter lasted about twenty fevered and hallucinatory minutes. Golden-yellow candlelight throwing like a blanket over the old stretching scars. Two bites — the first at the ribs. The second at the neck. How he would not look Sirius in the eyes. How rabidly Sirius loved him. Like an ocean or a wood — like the spreading hungry moor. 

He had watched Remus go. Eighteen. He was to take the Muggle train to Calais and from there hitchhike to Brittany where a pack had agreed to speak with him. When he returned Sirius waited at the bedside in St. Mungo’s for a week before the mediwizards decided it was safe to lift the magical coma. James came — Sirius had fallen asleep holding Remus’s hand limp and cold as a strange white fish. They had never told him but certainly he had known. He’d brought Muggle beers in brown paper bags. James. He woke Sirius with a hand on his shoulder and his eyes were dark and soft. 

“Veritaserum,” Dumbledore said. When Sirius opened his eyes his vision was a grey-black blur. “Need I remind you. I can show you the batch paperwork if you so desire. Quality material — manufactured by, some would say the best potionmaker in Europe, Khnopff’s, in Bruges…” 

“Stop talking,” said Sirius. 

“On the contrary my dear boy. I doubt you would have come here if you did not want to speak with me.” 

“Greyback nearly killed him,” Sirius said, weakly, “1978. December…” 

“I recall. The lawyers did indeed question him to that effect. Rather a ruse. Lupin consented to it — to displace doubt. Why Greyback left him alive to begin with had always been suspicious to me. But you must understand by now pain is different in their understanding.” 

He had been there when Remus woke up and clasped his hand so tightly he could feel his bones grinding together and he blinked the false sleep from eyes hardly seeing. He tried Sirius’s name and he could only manage the first letter and then he passed out again. Incrementally the grip loosened and Sirius pulled his hand free to stroke Remus’s hair back from his face out of the tape of the bandages that covered the great clawed tear from his jaw to his hairline, across his nose and mouth and through the corner of one eye where occasionally formerly the freckles had wrinkled when he laughed. He had been there — he had been there, since 1974, when Remus woke up. 

“He was a very good liar, Sirius, you would do well to realize.” 

“ _Was_?” 

“Pardon me. He remains a very good liar.” 

He could feel his stomach turning inside out and his head was slamming like a door and gingerly he stood. The floor under his feet seemed shaking but perhaps it was just his complete self. He wanted to reach in through his mouth and pull his heart out. There was a fist around it tightening. 

“I have a doctor friend at St. Mungo’s I’d like you to see,” said Dumbledore. He was writing something on a ragged square of pale parchment. “I can set up an appointment for you today — four PM. I think you might want to see him sooner than later.” 

“I don’t want to talk to a shrink.” 

Dumbledore cocked an eyebrow thick and bushy like a strange albino caterpillar. “Dr. Menuck is not a psychiatrist. He is a specialist in sexually communicated magical ailments.” 

Sirius covered his mouth with his hand and turned away. In the back of his throat he tasted bile. 

“I understand this is a lot to swallow. Which is why I insist that after your appointment tonight you drink that dreamless sleep potion post-haste.” 

When he took the piece of parchment his fingers touched — just — Dumbledore’s cold hand. The eyes were bright and cold and blank as the winter sky. He put the paper in his pocket and then he Apparated back to his room at the Hotel Rome. The nausea of the red-dark spinning squeeze was the last his body could take and he landed in the room on his knees on the stained wood floor and puked. Liquid came to his nose and eyes and when there was nothing left in his stomach still it turned and turned. Finally he lay on the floor in a shaft of pale sun, and he didn’t remember anything for a while, until there was a knock at the door, and he closed his mouth, and the horrible sound stopped. 

“Alright?” It was the woman from the desk downstairs. 

He Vanished the vomit and splashed his face again with the bloody metallic water and went to the door. She peered into his bleary eyes and past him into the room on a practiced scan for drugs. “What is it?” 

“It’s been four hours.” 

“Right.” He reached in his pocket for his wallet, which wasn’t there. Hating himself he put as much intent in his voice as he could muster. “I need to stay here for another couple days.” 

“This is an _hourly_ hotel.” 

“I know. Just a couple days.” 

She narrowed her eyes at him. At first he feared it had not worked but then she took a step back from the door. “Fine. Check-out’s at eleven AM.” 

He shut the door and showered. His sweat was rancid with sick and fear. He dressed again in his rumpled stinking clothes and lay in the rumpled stinking bed. He supposed distantly he could go back to the flat. But in the flat Remus’s teacup would still be out and half-drunk and it would have gone rancid so much cream did he take with his Earl Grey. Their clothes would be on the bedroom floor. Their records — on the stereo as ever would be Wire’s _154._ “In an act of contrition I lay down by your side…” 

At 3:45 he stood. The world spun. At long last he was starting to feel not drunk. And already the sky was darkening. He took the parchment from his pocket. In Dumbledore’s spidery handwriting it read: 

_November 5 1981, 4pm_  
_Dr. Roger Menuck_  
_Specialist in Sexually Transmitted Magical Maladies  
_ _St. Mungo’s Hospital, Shepherd’s Bush, London_

For five minutes he paced before the window in the pale dusk. The glass had started to show amidst its fingerprints and cracks and unidentifiable stains the reflection of his face and its dark circles and the thousand-yard stare and the mouth thin and pale and unclosing with shock and he found he could not look at it very long. At 3:53 he pulled his hair up slowly because his hands were shaking. He took a long deep breath and he squeezed his hands into fists so tight he felt his ragged nails press into the soft skin of his palms. Then he Apparated. 

\--

He sat on the exam table in a short paper gown kicking his heels against the supports with deep sonorous thuds and he tried as best he could to keep his head empty and finally he looked at his moonwatch. 

5:12. 

Dr. Menuck was a French Canadian with the appropriate accent who had opened with the necessary small talk leading into some friendly investigative fondling with a cold hand and then he had bade Sirius masturbate into a plastic cup. 

“I can provide — appropriate supplies if necessary,” he said, “there are magazines — ”

“It’s alright.” 

He left the room. Sirius stared around the tiny windowless airless room at the diagrams illuminating the finer workings of the male reproductive system. He wondered if Dr. Menuck was aware of any of the particulars of the situation. 

He licked his palm; his skin was bitter. Shut his eyes. Attempted to think of something besides the obvious. 

When he had finished he poked his head into the hallway and a nurse came and took the cup. That was at 4:35. In the interim he had read through several of the pamphlets delineating detailed information about Aberystwyth Herpes, Bryson’s Renegades Genital Pox, and Wizard’s Lice, conveniently shelved alongside _Muggle STIs — Yes, You Are At Risk!_ and _Adult Onset Squibness: Frequently Asked Questions_. It seemed most wizarding sexual maladies turned your junk rainbow colors, Sirius observed based on the illustrations. It was a phenomenon he simply had not noticed in himself or any of his sexual partners of which for the last four years there had only been one. 

At 5:30 there was a gentle knock at the door and Sirius’s stomach turned inside out again. He rearranged all the literature he’d perused and sat again on the exam table. “Come in.” 

Dr. Menuck held a clipboard and smiled self-assuredly and Sirius smiled back. Perhaps he would say there was nothing. If there was nothing he would take the point to Dumbledore and he would ask to see the memory in the Pensieve. He would petition the Ministry for the trial transcript. 

“Mr. Black,” said Dr. Menuck. He sat on his rolling leather stool before Sirius and when he did his eyes changed. The cold thing in Sirius’s belly drilled all the way down. “I wonder if you are familiar with the island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea.” 

“What?” said Sirius. He was embarrassed to hear how fragile his voice sounded. “Yes.” 

“There is an island just to the North of Malta that the Maltese call Ghawdex. Until around 1675 it was inhabited primarily by werewolves. Some very prominent werewolf scholars have argued that it is in fact the atavistic homeland of the race. When wizarding settlement was attempted — well, the history is very interesting but it is not much relevant to the issue at hand. Which is that you have an illness that has been traced back to this island and as such is named for it. Ghawdex Syndrome. Otherwise sometimes it is called Lycanthropic Neurosyphilis.” 

Through the apocalyptic beehive buzzing in his ears he really only heard _neurosyphilis_. 

“It is in fact Sirius a very interesting illness and it is treatable. Some things about it are going to be difficult. I wonder if you have noticed anything strange or unusual about your magic?” 

“Yes,” he said, very slowly. Dr. Menuck was looking at him with a great gentle kindness. Something started to come untied. “I haven’t touched my wand in — since Halloween. I’ve Apparated without it thrice today… I can — I’ve done _Oblivate, Evanesco_ … I was never very good with wandless magic before. I thought it was just — things have been — strange.” He swallowed very hard the lump in his throat and it did not move. “It — it makes me more powerful?” 

“No. No, perhaps it does right now. The mechanism of it is not fully understood. Some doctors refer to it as a curse — rather like lycanthropy is a curse. It selectively kills and/or mutates your magical DNA. Thus the general gist is, it is going to be more difficult for you, possibly for the rest of your life, to control your magic.” 

He thought he might be sick again. His face must have drained of color because Dr. Menuck quickly Summoned a chromatic bowl from the counter beside the sink and pressed it into Sirius’s lap. 

“Right now you are very strong. Some of the greatest wizarding minds of all time and indeed some of the greatest duelists have been thought to have had Ghawdex Syndrome. Other times maybe you will be able to manage one or two spells in a day. Sometimes when you do magic it will cause you physical pain, disorientation, nausea… Now, there are courses of treatment — ”

He paused when Sirius puked again. The back of his throat ached with it — acid, soreness. The doctor stood and gently rubbed his back. 

“There is treatment. Not a cure or at least not yet. There may very well be one in your lifetime. There is much research currently in development. There are a few experimental options we could try, or there is a tried-and-true method that — ”

“How did I get this?” Sirius interrupted. 

“How did you — well, do you have a new partner?” 

“No. I was with — I had the same person for four years.” 

“Werewolf?” 

So help him Sirius could not meet the doctor’s eyes. “Yes.” 

“Is she from the UK?” 

“He, yes, he’s from Somerset — not so far from Glastonbury.” 

_REMUS LUPIN WEREWOLF OF CASTLE CARY SOMERSET FOUND GUILTY TODAY OF THE FIRST DEGREE MURDER OF PETER PETTIGREW AND ACCOMPLICE TO THE MURDER OF JAMES AND LILY POTTER — PARENTS DECEASED 1979 UNDER “SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES” SAYS MINISTRY SOURCE —_

“Born a werewolf?” 

“No,” Sirius said, “he was four or five.” 

“It is rather unlikely he was born with it, then,” said Dr. Menuck. He was thoughtfully stroking his chin. “It’s unclear if it can be transmitted through the bite. He would have had to catch it from someone else.” 

“I never had any symptoms until — ”

“It can lie dormant any number of years. Also like neurosyphilis. In some there are preliminary stages but you may have never gone through those, or noticed them.” 

“And it’s — only through sex?” 

“If you transfused me your blood likely I would get it,” said Dr. Menuck. “Otherwise yes. Only sex.” 

Only sex. As if on rotation in the devil’s slide machine Sirius recalled the memories he had done his best to shove from his mind earlier whilst obliged to make his cock behave as though his lover had not just destroyed his life. All Remus’s skin under him — Remus’s hands in his hair. He tasted like dust. Sirius could have devoured him and sometimes attempted. _Only sex_. All the frantic love and convincing. Purest desperation. Remus reading his face for something — for suspicion, he later realized. Finding nothing. Pressing his nose and his fluttering eyelashes against Sirius’s neck. When he came and he didn’t make a sound and he stopped breathing and his heart Sirius could see — could feel — pounding in the hollow of his ribs. Like a herd of wild animals invisible over a far rise. 

From the pockets of his lime-green coat Dr. Menuck took a self-inking quill and a prescription pad and wrote Sirius out a follow-up appointment. “I hope you will be able to come and see me again next week and we can talk about a treatment plan for you. And you are welcome to bring your partner or he can contact me and get his own appointment — ”

“That’s not necessary,” said Sirius. His voice was raw with acid. He wondered if Remus would even feel it. In Azkaban where they ate magic — they sucked at it like it was ambrosia. He would be altogether clueless. Meanwhile Sirius would be making himself sick trying so much as _wingardium leviosa._

Dr. Menuck furrowed his friendly brow. But then he said, “Alright.” He pressed the slip of paper into Sirius’s hand. “I advise you keep a daily journal of what magic you can and cannot perform. Many witches and wizards with Ghawdex Syndrome find great success in simply discovering their rhythm.” 

“Right,” said Sirius. 

“You may get dressed,” said Dr. Menuck. He Vanished the vomit in the metal bowl. “Feel free — if you need to sit and think. You were my last appointment today. The nurses will have literature for you, when you leave.” 

Manfully he clasped Sirius’s shoulder and then he went out. After a few minutes Sirius stood and slowly he dressed. He would go to the flat that night, he told himself, and he would find his wand, and new clothes, and he would have a peek around, and he would take some records with him, and the mason jar of pot that was under the bed, and perhaps also the coke he was hiding from Remus in a sock in his drawer, and definitely the Old Ogden’s in the cabinet above the fridge, and then he would go back to the Hotel Rome, and he would see what exactly Dr. Menuck meant by _right now you are very strong_. He rather did not feel that he was strong at all. He rather felt disintegrating. 

When he had dressed he checked the mirror to find his hair had fallen from where he had tied it up around his face and ears and neck artfully and the soft hollows under his eyes were almost black. Elsewhere he looked vampirically bloodless. Pale and sick and narrow and strange as a portrait in the second floor hallway in Grimmauld Place. Located conveniently across from the House Elf busts. 

He went out. He took the literature from the nurses and in the designated atrium he Apparated to the flat in Chalk Farm. For a heart-skipping moment he thought there was another shadow in the room with him upon the ragged secondhand couch absently filling the ashtray but it was only the pale cast of the flickering streetlight through the smudged window. 


	3. Chapter 3

** Azkaban  
** _ February 1993 _

The second trial tasted different from the get-go. The poison was not as poison and right off the bat he felt the other thing within him laughing. “It won’t work,” he said to Dumbledore after he choked down the contents of the first chalice.

“It is a rather lower dose of monkshood than the last time,” Dumbledore said. Remus stood as close to the door as he could bear just for the despair-clearing light of Dumbledore’s Patronus — a strange pale bird watching him with smart beady eyes. This close he could smell Dumbledore’s breath and in doing so he remembered garlic for the first time in twelve years. 

“I can taste that,” said Remus, “I can feel it. It’s not enough.” 

“Hmm,” said Dumbledore. “Rather a waste of a course, then.” 

“Can’t you bring something with different measurements for the last two?” 

“The doses have to be identical,” said Dumbledore. “That we discerned from the first trials.” 

This thought was so horrible he had remembered it in the interim. The courses they had concocted for Remus were refined. They had worked out what was a killing dose and what wasn’t on werewolves before him. He wondered what Dumbledore and Snape had done with the bodies; it was probably nothing dignifying. He recalled the claims of the packs he had visited in the blackest wartime days, ’79, ’80, ’81, which at the time he had vehemently denied. Mass graves — potions testing, spell testing, forced sterilization. Roundups of packs and homeless loners alike across the isles and the continent who disappeared at a new moon and were never heard from again. Vanished as though sunk. Informants quoted in photocopied pamphlets said a “cure” was sought in silent white rooms underground at the Ministry as was a mechanism to discern lycanthropy in utero. All Remus could tell them in his guilt and his own fear was that he doubted it would be much better under Voldemort’s rule. 

“How did you feel the last month,” said Dumbledore, “anything out of the ordinary to report?” 

How did you feel the last month, as though the answer could be anything other than, treading the the very cold and blunt knife-edge of madness. Focusing with every scrap of consciousness he could scrape together from wherever despair had scattered the rest of it to cover his hand with his mouth to keep from screaming. 

“I don’t remember,” Remus told him. 

Dumbledore’s mouth and eyebrow quirked. When he left Remus stayed in the door as long as he could stand to feel the strange pulsing imprint of the Patronus. 

\--

By some miracle they did not come to the door that night and the wind blew the right way so he sat very close to the window in the frigid February cold blowing mist off the sea in pale grey sheets and he watched the clouds move around the moon showing edges of sickly blue-white light like skim milk slip over the stone and through the narrow window and onto his skin where it itched like an old scar — like the oldest scar. 

Gingerly, tenderly, he gathered up what he could of his thoughts. Like a basket of puppies. 

Voldemort was not dead. That much was certain. There had been no body and anyway he would have taken precautions with his soul. He had named himself for his fear of death. In Azkaban at night Remus heard his servants screaming and screaming and screaming to the walls and the black beasts and the cold sea and sometimes he enjoyed the sound of it — like some or another brutal orchestra. They had killed his friends and tortured other of them to madness and now they themselves were tormented by the same memory. Possessed by the same despair. Sometimes they just sounded like the sea. Like the occasional lost birds — strange Arctic creatures laid over to rest on migration Northward or Southward depending on the season, bright beaks, chattering, yammering, bitter unpretty wailing at the wind and the fish and the stone. 

Two of Voldemort’s most treasured and productive servants remained at large. Often Remus wondered after Peter who likely had not put his human form back on since 1981, and thus it remained to be seen if he still had one. A rat could be anywhere in Europe but Peter would not. He would remain where it was convenient — where he could be called upon when necessary — as were probably his orders. As such it was likely he was in London, in the Ministry or the Wizengamot, or else he was at Hogwarts. 

As for the other he could not be sure. Some werewolves claimed they could sense their master’s moods or presence like a strange twin and as such lycanthropic legend (the stuff of Remus’s seventh-year final project) was full of quasi-Arthurian stories of young werewolves tracking down by a series of premonitions and dreams the sickly old man who twenty years previous had administered the bite under ritualistic and often creepily sexualized circumstances. Their reunion was charged with a wistful, impotent eroticism ending with the younger one’s assumption of his rightful pack as the sometime wasteland bloomed again eternal. Remus had gathered the legends from assorted werewolves — most of them he’d met in supervised transformation cells in London, Edinburgh, Inverness, and Manchester, camping out in the lobby by the coffee and the pain potions after a full moon with a folding table and a poster — and recorded all the stories to cassette tape with a recorder he’d magicked himself. Some of them made him a little sick. In Inverness he had met another of Greyback’s who sniffed him out and afterwards took him for breakfast at a greasy diner. She was perhaps ten years his senior and she chain-smoked and she looked like she cut her hair with a knife. Her name was Indra Bhediya. She had been bitten on a camping trip in Cairngorms when she was six and resultantly her family had had her homeschooled in magic for fear she would be found out and killed at Hogwarts. 

Remus told her he was from Somerset. “Yeah,” she told him; her mouth was full. “He gets around.” She had met others of Greyback’s in her travels — as far away as Ulaanbaatar she claimed to have caught a scent in a crowded bar. 

Later she drove him to the train station and in the car she told him a legend she’d been told by an older werewolf woman her aunt had had come to the Bhediya family home in Glasgow to reassure teenage Indra she was not alone with her dual bloody monthly curses. Remus liked the story because it vaguely paralleled that of Judith and Holofernes. He wrote a full chapter of analysis on it that the female half of his defense committee had enjoyed thoroughly, as had his copy editor, Lily Evans. 

Sometimes he could remember text of it: 

_Killing of the master in werewolf mythology is generally the domain of women, traitors, and cowards. Heroes of werewolf legend serve their master faithfully until they inherit his domain (see: chapter 2, “Werewolf Hero as Parsifal”). However there is a nascent feminist strain in werewolf mythology propagated in part by nineteenth and early twentieth century all-female European communal packs eg. those of Eve La Rochelle, Valencia Cortez, Ludmilla Skala, Margaret Ramsey, etc. One legend of these packs was told to me in Inverness by Indra Bhediya, 26, one of a new generation of English packless werewolves who transform in privately owned supervised transformation cells (see: chapter 5, “Supervised Transformation Communities as 20th Century Packs”)._

_Many feminist packs do not administer the bite due to the lack of victim consent inherent in this action. “The bite is like its own rape,” said Margaret Ramsey in her 1906 autobiography, Memoirs of a Manx Maidenwolf. Ludmilla Skala’s pack, headquartered outside of Minsk, Belarus, adopted female werewolves who were bitten by males and summarily not allowed to join male packs. Skala became infamous in the years before the Muggle WWII for assisting her packmates in the murders of at least 15 male werewolf masters._

It had been raining so he waited in Indra’s car for the train. The radio was playing something off the Stones’ _Beggars Banquet_ and Remus, as ever in his seventh year, was thinking about Sirius. Then Indra tentatively reached over and shifted the collar of Remus’s coat. Her lacquered nails were long and cold. 

“I’m sorry,” she told him when he flinched a little. “It’s just like mine. See?” 

She adjusted the wild orange fur at her own collar and showed him. 

“I’ve never seen one so like mine,” Indra said. Her breath fogged the drivers’ side window. Her skin was smooth and dark but for the old wound which was gnarled twisted white and Remus could count the teeth. 

“I have another,” he told her when she turned back to him. “Here.” He moved his jacket and lifted his t-shirt and showed her. 

“Yes,” she said, “I have it too. I can’t show you because I’m wearing a dress.” But she clapped her hand over her ribs and belly where it would be. “Do you see — this one is to make us how he wanted. This one — ” She covered the scar on her neck — “This one is just to hold us down.” 

On the train back Southerly toward Hogwarts he listened through the stories he’d collected on the cassette. He had spent a while with Indra and the sky was already gathering dark. It was a Thursday… back at school the three of them would be rushing to do all their work so they could have the weekend free. Remus’s back hurt, and some region of his head behind and between his eyes. The nice thing about the supervised transformation cells was that the wolf could smell and hear others of its kind and their proximity calmed something primordial in its mind. This would make it into the project in the form of Chapter 5. 

He listened twice through to Indra’s story. Her rich-butter voice and colonial accent reminded him of the newscasters on Radio India which his mother had listened to religiously in his youth because she loved Ravi Shankar. He had listened to Indra’s cassette so many times in order to transcribe it and after the events of December 1978 he had dug it back up and listened to it again on occasion when he was alone in the flat wondering after Sirius who was due to come back and help him with the bandages and as such he could remember it even in Azkaban:

_Once upon a time there was a girl. My aunt’s friend called her Luna which I always thought was such lazy mythmaking. It was so lazy that for a while I thought she had just made up the story. But then I heard it again in Kolkata, except the girl’s name was Chandra, which also means moon. Anyway she lived in a small town on the edge of the woods with her father and brothers. Down the street she had a suitor who asked her to meet him in the forest on the night of the full moon. But when she went to meet him of course he wasn’t there. Instead there was a big silver wolf. Luna-Chandra ran but the wolf was faster. It pushed her down and bit her at the back of the neck._

_In the morning she went to her family who saw what had happened and would not let her across the threshold of the home in which she had grown up. She went to her suitor who saw her wound and would not let her across the threshold of his home. She went to live alone in the woods and as the month went by she felt the moon get heavier and heavier in the sky like it was putting sand or ballast into her bones. On the night of the full moon she went to the edge of the forest behind the home of her suitor. While she transformed she watched him transform also into the silver wolf who had bit her. In the night they fought and they hurt each other but not to the point of killing. She woke up with his blood and grist in her teeth. She went again to his house and he would not let her across the threshold. Then she went again to the house of her father and brothers who would not let her across the threshold. So she walked further into the woods._

_After she walked for seven days she met a group of seven women who lived in the forest and she smelled about them that the gift and curse they bore was not dissimilar. They welcomed her to their fire and shared their food and water and a potent spirit they made from the tuber of a sapling. She told them what had happened and how she had been barred from entering her family home or the home of her suitor who was also her master. The women told her a ritual she could perform which would make her her own master but first she would have to train and rehearse to undertake it._

_For seven weeks the women taught the girl how to perform the ritual that would make her her own master. On the full moons she learned how to fight with her teeth and with her wolf self and on the other days she learned how to fight with a staff and a saber and with her hands and feet. The oldest women among the group taught the girl the spells she would perform to complete the ritual._

_Just before the next full moon she walked back to her village and went to the door of her suitor’s house. Again he would not let her across the threshold. So she went to the door of the house where her father and brothers lived, and they would not let her across the threshold. So she waited in the woods until the moon came up and in the night in a clearing in the forest she fought and killed her suitor. In the morning when they regained their human bodies she cut his belly open with a magic knife and took out the organs and wrapped them in wet cloths. Then she preserved them with special spells. She buried what was left of the body in a shallow grave and then she walked into the forest._

_Her master’s heart and brain she buried in the place where she had been bitten. She climbed the tallest mountain in her nation and at the top of it she buried his lungs. She went to the lowest swamp in her nation and in the bottom of it she put rocks inside the bundle of his liver and kidneys and spleen so it would sink. She went back to her village under cover of darkness and she left his stomach outside the house of her father and brothers. His head she put on the doorstep of his own house, so his spirit would not be able to return there, and so that his other servants would understand he had been vanquished._

_Then she went to the grave of his heart and brain in the place where he had bitten her and she said the spells she had been taught by the oldest women:_ Relinquo Servitutem. Et Libertas Mea. _When she stood up she had become her own master._

The highest point in the United Kingdom Remus had looked up in February 1979 when he was well enough to leave the flat for the local Muggle library and the wounds across his face were healed enough to attract only mild stares. It was Ben Nevis in Scotland at 1344 meters above sea level. One could take the rail to Fort William and hitchhike or walk. The lowest point was Holme Fen, Cambridgeshire, which was altogether not so far from London. As for where he had been bitten he could find it in his sleep. He found sometimes the memory of it was the only one he could retrieve. 

\--

When he woke after the full moon he could feel his human self chasing the other out in nauseating shakedown purge. The dawn was coming in through the window upon the eternity of black water. The change had been as normal — he hadn’t kept grips on his mind for a second past moonrise. And unlike Remus the wolf had still not learned, after twelve years, to bear the cage. 

“Rather a wash this time I’m afraid,” he heard Dumbledore say from the door over the patient catching and reordering of his own heartbeat. Gingerly he tried his fingers and toes and then his wrists and ankles. Elbows and knees — hips and shoulders. Sirius had used to sing him on occasion, loopy with sleeplessness, the attendant song from Muggle kindergarten he had overheard once in Knightsbridge and found utterly hilarious. When the wind blew in the right way Remus could remember it but it seemed it never did on full moon mornings. When he hugged his knees to his chest he could feel he had no ribs broken. It was just as well — on the occasions he had fractured ribs before Dementors had simply brought a small single-use bottle of off-brand Skele-Gro to his cell door and pushed it in the flap with his breakfast. Then they had stood there and hovered with such curious sucking intensity he could hardly remember he had a rib broken for the brutal black wash of cold-sweat fear. 

He remembered the song, because of the Patronuses in the door. _Head shoulders knees and toes knees and toes_. He remembered it in the posh schoolmarm voice Sirius would put on and how Sirius would kiss his shoulder — how he would trace the bones and then he would take Remus’s hand. He would sit on the edge of the bed in his school pants knocking his heels against the heavy wooden frame occasionally yawning so widely he would show his lack of tonsils (they had been removed in the Black family home at Grimmauld Place when Sirius was six or seven, by a hack doctor who had been dismissed from St. Mungo’s who cut them into a porcelain bowl. Sirius would say he suspected his cousin had used them in some of her earliest Dark experimentation). Like this — sixth, seventh year — Remus thought sometimes the air between them was a different weight and taste and color. Sirius smelled good, his sweat and his hair: vanilla, marijuana smoke, lavender, the soporific Edinburgh environs of Remus’s Squib hippie aunt. He smelled a little like blood and like running and like dirt and woods and wet dog and watching him pull back his hair made Remus’s mouth dry up. How the skin would move around the bones. Shadow — darkness. The fine dark hair below his bellybutton and under his arms. His soft and mobile red mouth just open showing teeth, tongue. He was sixteen and trying to tell himself he thought Sirius was beautiful like a painting. They had precious few monographs in the Hogwarts Library but sometimes Remus would find one and sit in the aisles running his fingers gently over the glossy images wondering what it would be like to touch someone else’s skin which to date he had only managed extremely unsatisfactorily with Rosie Samberg at the Yule Ball. 

Waterhouse, he remembered, then the frightening ones who only painted Salome and Parsifal. 

Gingerly he sat and dragged the wool blanket from the corner over his lap and observed the wounds, which were as normal. His hands were bloody with a few minor wounds and the wolf had scratched as it often did at the scars procured in Brittany in 1978 as if to mark over them with its own efforts. Already Remus had marked over them with a few dearly wishful self-inflicted tattoos — the tea leaf divination symbology that meant “do not disturb.” One of the deepest, on his inside left forearm, he had marked over in a moment of lucidity with an aerial diagram of Stonehenge. In the door they watched him with furrowed brows and Remus found he could not look at them very long. He wondered which Ministry departments each of them worked in. _Department for the Rights of the Incarcerated. Department of Part-Human Affairs. Department for the Ethical Testing of Potions. Department of the Surgeon General_. 

Redon, he remembered — Odilon Redon, and Jean Delville. Fernand Khnopff who painted again and again his wild red-headed sister. 

After the last moon, Remus remembered, he had asked Dumbledore about Harry. Dumbledore had said Harry did not know about the circumstances of his parents’ death which meant he was not with Sirius and as such Remus had entertained amidst all the other customary despair in the interim month the as-yet-unconsidered notion that Sirius was dead. Regardless he had asked two questions so he still had eight. Of which Dumbledore was bound by his word to answer five. 

His breakfast was brought and with the bitter metallic water and a corner of the blanket Remus cleaned his wounds and his face and then he dressed. On the tarnishing tin plate whoever it was that assembled the food in this place had laid out a scoop of porridge and a block of soy protein and a handful of very large vitamins in the most unappetizing possible arrangement. Remus poked the soy block and everything wiggled. It had no smell as it had no taste but still he had to look away from it to keep his stomach from turning upside down and when he looked up Dumbledore was waiting, alone now, in the window. His pure white beard and mustache and the underside of his nose glowed grey-blue in his bird’s light. 

“Have you your questions?” 

Remus tried to say yes but at first his voice failed him. 

“Yes. I could see about getting you another cup of water. There was, last night — much howling.” 

“It’s quite — ” Remus coughed. Was there ever not much howling? When he tried again it worked. “It’s quite all right. Um, I’ve thought of the questions.” At the door Dumbledore had steepled his fingers contemplatively. Remus didn’t dare stand but he moved as close to the door as he could to feel even through it the wash of sweet blue light. Dumbledore knew already what he would ask, he suspected; it was in the expectant arch of one thick eyebrow. So he out and asked it: “Is Sirius safe?”

“Yes,” said Dumbledore. Inside Remus one of the several horrors curled up and went back to sleep. “He is — under my auspices.” 

That was vaguely disconcerting given since November 1 1981 Remus had thoroughly distrusted Dumbledore’s auspices but exactly what that entailed was a question which would not be answered. “Does he believe I — does he think I betrayed James and Lily?” 

Dumbledore sighed. “Remus, the entirety of wizarding Britain does.” 

Remus bit his lip. He looked up into the door expectantly. 

“Of course he does,” said Dumbledore. 

Sirius, he remembered, had not come to the trial. Remus had asked after him over and over and over. In the courtroom he had looked around obsessively at the gathered journalists and Ministry officials and Hogwarts professors and jurors and at the swollen pink face of the judge and he had not paid much attention even to the proceedings of his own indictment until the bailiff came up and pried his mouth open with some silver implement to drip a measured dose of Veritaserum on his tongue. Then they had brought Fenrir Greyback in from the holding room and Remus’s brain had stopped running even on its wrong tracks. 

“Does he know my defense from the trial?” 

Dumbledore’s brow furrowed; he had not expected this. Remus’s attempt at self-defense (there had been “no time” to secure him a lawyer) had lasted all of ten minutes. There were not many wizarding advocacy groups for the rights of the accused arguing that Veritaserum was not necessarily the most admissible methodology. The Ministry lawyer had been a tall and cold blonde woman in loud stiletto heels. Before the administration of the potion she had asked Remus if he had anything to say in his defense. He had been trying very very hard to keep his wits about him but they had kept him in the bowels of the Ministry alone with two Dementor guards for three or four days. “Peter Pettigrew was James and Lily’s Secret Keeper,” Remus had said, slowly and carefully. He was remembering his father, two years dead by then, telling him, age eleven: when you are angry they will think you are an angry werewolf. When you are depressed they will think you are a depressed werewolf. When you make a mistake they will think you are a stupid werewolf. In the echo in the chamber he did not recognize his own voice. “A change was made — two months ago under suspicion of a spy. When I heard what he had done I went looking for him. And I watched him — Sectumsempra his own finger. He can turn into a rat, you see.” 

Silence in the courtroom but for Pettigrew’s mother who sobbed. 

Thence came the drug and it bound him to answer the lawyer’s questions with absolute truth. And yet her questions were poised particularly. “Did you or did you not use the killing curse against Peter Pettigrew.” 

“Yes,” he had had to say, because he had tried it, and it had failed. He had not enough will, which after all was perhaps the story of his life. 

“Did you or did you not betray James and Lily Potter to their deaths.” 

“Yes,” he had had to say, because he had told them he was certain they should change their Secret Keeper. 

Other questions later, yes yes yes. Yes — brutal Joycean refrain dragged out of him like with knives. 

“I am not certain if he knows or not,” Dumbledore said from the door. “He petitioned the Ministry in 1987 for the trial transcripts.” 

Remus’s heart twisted painfully. 

“I am not sure if the petition was successful,” Dumbledore went on. “I could check in with the relevant authorities.” 

If Sirius had read the transcript in 1987 and it was 1993 it was unlikely he had found anything in there with the necessary resonance to sway his conviction in the slightest. “No need,” Remus told Dumbledore. 

“You’re quite certain?” 

It was easier to imagine Sirius hadn’t read it and thus he hadn’t known. Dumbledore’s eyebrow had cocked again in relentless expectation but Remus would not waste a sixth question on something so inconsequential as, _does Sirius know about me and Greyback_. 

“Yes,” he said instead, “that’s all.” 

He stood. Everything shook. His knees hurt and soon the bird would leave the door. 

“Bring me better poison next time,” he said to Dumbledore. 

Remus’s least favorite thing was in his eye, and the tight smile did not reach it. “Certainly I will.” 

\--

_He is under my auspices_ , Remus remembered. A storm blew the sea. The world was like a painting in monochrome Telex reproduction. The moon — heavy half. He could not tell whether it was waxing or waning. 

They had stepped away from the door. When they did it was like waking up very slowly. Down the hall someone was crying. 

Auspice: a divine or prophetic token — a favorable sign. Divination by a bird-reader. 

Remus pressed his hand inside his shirt against the largest wound. Do Not Disturb. 

Sirius had put a bird feeder outside the kitchen window — 1979. Filled it with suet. The birds were quiet and they were dun-grey and nervous and they moved quickly. Remus watched them while he did dishes. Sirius came home and snuck up behind him to embrace him and Remus would run his fingers up and down the veins in his forearm. Just to check. Sirius would let him and Remus would feel his pulse change. 

Yes it had been that long. Why would somebody love him if they didn’t have to? Especially after. He did not know if Sirius knew all of it. If perhaps they had told him in the hospital. Hell if he didn’t feel like an idiot about it now when he could summon the full flower of emotion. Moony Moony Love. Here, here you are Moony Love. Bloody freezing mornings when the first thing he would see would be the soft silver-grey lens of Sirius’s eyes. 

_He is under my auspices._ Of course now that he thought about it it was rather obvious. If Dumbledore had not let Sirius raise Harry then Sirius would have found some other way. As such he would be at Hogwarts. And as such would the rat be — oversight, underfoot, out of mind, false dead. 

They were long gone now from the door and he was so tired. If he ever left this place he would do what needed to be done and then he would crawl into some wooded bower and sleep for eternity like one of the mythic kings. Until awoken by a wish or a kiss or a touch to the forehead or a knife through the belly. 

He thought he slept but he could never be sure. In the dream he walked along a high wall in a city he had never been. It was dark — the moon was waxing and he was waiting. The shops were closed. In the apartments above shutters had been thrown wide against the summer heat and from inside the crackling of conversation and records on turntables. The air smelled of pale and bitter salt. In his mouth a sticky caramel slicked sweet burntness thick against the back of his throat. 

Wild yearning. A compulsion of the jaw, which he hinged and cracked. He checked a pocketwatch on a delicate golden filament only to learn the man he awaited must have been delayed. So he swung it in a lazy loop like a false hypnotist and he yawned and he waited. Echoing amidst the buildings and the high walls were the footsteps of fine shoes clattering on the cobbles like some failed Theseus in the labyrinthine maze of the city (and he himself the minotaur) and when he finally saw the visitor he was half an hour behind schedule. 

“You’re late,” he said. The blonde head perked and the eyes lifted and then they slid askance again. It was Lucius Malfoy. 


	4. Chapter 4

** Oxford  
** _ November 1983  _

In late December 1981 Sirius received by owl post at the Hotel Rome an affidavit from the Ministry which functionally Honorably Discharged him from any and all future employment under their jurisdiction. Shortly thereafter following a dismal period of drunkenness wherein he could not perform even the slightest magic without incurring a splitting headache another owl arrived in the middle of the night carrying gingerly in her claws the deed and the key to a penthouse apartment in Cowley once owned by his Uncle Alphard, a sometime professor of Prehistoric Wizardry in the Magical History graduate program at Oxford.

In the pale cast of streetlight through the window illuminating tenderest snowfall (it was January) Sirius held the deed and looped the keyring round his finger and thought for a bitter snatched moment about tearing it up. He had not left the Hotel Rome’s block since the middle of November — what with the discount grocery store on the corner and drug dealers these days being willing to meet him pretty much anywhere, there was no real need to. In his follow-up appointment Dr. Menuck had given Sirius two potion recipes (one for when his magic felt too weak, to give it a boost; the other for when it felt too intense, to “take the edge off”) that he could make himself with rather simple, affordable ingredients available over the counter at any potions supplier. Yet Sirius had not been able to summon the will to return to the flat in Chalk Farm to retrieve his cauldron or his kit or any of it, and besides most days since then he had not been able to Apparate even with a wand. 

He went to his bedside table and rifled through his things. He was out of coke and whiskey and there was one rather dismal nugget of weed left and he had even taken all the acid he’d bought on a whim, though the second trip had mostly constituted his lying in the disgusting bed crying for a full day watching the sun move across the floor. For just long enough that it got to him he’d imagined (it was the thickness of the windowpanes, the dusting of snow on the rooftops, the bitter draught under the door) he himself was in Azkaban. Even sober he supposed part of him was. 

So as such he rented a moving truck, drove to the flat in Chalk Farm, and retired with his grief, his records, and his not-modest inheritance to Alphard’s penthouse in Cowley. Unable to shirk his schedule from the Hotel Rome he slept through the day and at night got stoned and/or drunk and listened to music and read Alphard’s old books including the manuscript he had left unfinished when he had died, _Bran’s Bone Knife to the Elder Wand: A Theory of Magical Ur-Objects Through the Centuries_. It was a rather compellingly bizarre and esoteric magical theory text, especially for someone who had only ever read the most prevailing literature and even then had skimmed it royally being as he was at the time in the humid throes of a sexual awakening he now wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. 

Still it fascinated Sirius, who of late had been preoccupied with the notion of magical DNA — that the same substance that gave you magic also could give you blue eyes, or cystic fibrosis, or a distaste for cilantro. That something, a curse obtainable like a virus, could shuffle it up like a deck of cards, could change it, could even kill it. By 1982 he had begun to have good months and bad months. In the bad months he couldn’t do much but sit around and read and write and order dinner from the Greek restaurant down the street, which was how he ended up completing Alphard’s manuscript himself and publishing it via the University Press. Which was how, about a year after the publication, Dumbledore ended up at his door. 

Sirius was twenty-three and had been denied the privilege of adopting his godson who now lived with, he understood, horrific relations of Lily’s; he had quit dropping acid, listening to Talking Heads had become no longer fun and entertaining but rather invoked a brutal sort of paranoid nostalgia, and not a month ago he had brought somebody home from the bar and had his first (hilarious, embarrassing) experience of sex with a Muggle condom. On each full moon he shut his curtains tightly and got very drunk. He had not seen Dumbledore for over a year and had hoped he never would again. Still he made tea for the both of them. It was around five or six in the evening and already it was dark and as such Sirius had just woken up. He had put on the light at his writing desk and had gathered the books that he needed; he had been commissioned by a company that compiled textbooks for American magic schools to write a column for _Who Are We and How Did We Get Here: A Beginner’s Approach to Magical Theory._ Which seemed rather an existential title for a book intended to help thirteen year olds at dismal American magic schools understand the highly theoretical quasi-conclusions about why they could do the things they could do. Sirius was treating it as such with all sorts of playful asides and humorous historical moments and yet when Dumbledore studied the stack of his books intently his twinkling eyes and charmed smile made Sirius feel equal parts livid and humiliated. Much as he had felt when Dumbledore had asked him, gently, in his office at Hogwarts on the wild bleeding morning of November 2, 1981, can you explain to me the exact nature of your relationship with Remus Lupin. 

“With what do you intend to follow up your initial foray into the spine-tingling world of wizarding academia?” Dumbledore asked. He sat heavily in the ancient armchair Alphard had preferred in life and assembled his tea to his liking in a pretty floral teacup that had probably never before been used. 

Something twisted in Sirius’s gut. It took him a moment to place that it was pure revulsion at any kind of attempt at small talk after all that had happened. “I’ve been writing articles for children’s textbooks, sir, on commission.” 

“I suppose you find that a great deal less interesting than the Auror’s office.” 

“Yes, well, I was discharged from Ministry employment.” 

“I know,” Dumbledore told him; “I pushed the paperwork through.” 

Sirius had suspected this and as such it was not much of an effort to keep his face still. He watched the ripples move across the milky surface of his tea when a heavy truck passed in the street and wondered if any sort of divination could be gleaned this way. 

“Most of the surviving Order members have been discharged from Ministry service, Sirius, it’s hardly personal.” 

“Right.” 

“Perhaps I just foresaw your completing that incredible book,” Dumbledore said. His smile was in his voice but not his eyes. When Sirius met them the sharp blue was cold as glass. 

“It was just a bit of tying up loose ends.” 

“It might very well end up a classic of its field. I’ve seen it already on a couple syllabi at the college.” 

Sirius smelled an upcoming request for a Favor which he had been an expert at sniffing out since September of 1978. Usually they began with flattery and/or an appeal to common decency. 

“I’m looking to expand or rather revamp the Magical Theory program at Hogwarts,” said Dumbledore. “It’s an elective for OWL-level students and above and I’m looking for — somebody with fresh ideas. You’ll find the salary amenable. Room and board of course are fully paid for. Lovely chambers if I can say so myself in the South tower just recently emptied of years upon years of files… Hardwood floors and a lovely view — ” 

“I’m hardly qualified to teach.” 

“On the contrary, Sirius, are you not — in your own removed sort of way — teaching right now?” He indicated the stack of books on the desk. “You’d have only six classes, each of them thrice a week. Many academics would perhaps literally kill for a schedule like that. Allows plenty of freedom for — extra-curricular activities.” 

He wants to keep an eye on you, Sirius’s mind supplied. He wants to keep you from doing something rash like suicide or dark magic or research in particular directions. “What about my — some days I can hardly do magic.” 

“Yes,” said Dumbledore, steepling his fingers thoughtfully, “yes, I’d thought so, Ghawdex Syndrome, is it.” 

“It is.” 

_I dare you_ , Sirius thought. _Say something about it, I fucking dare you_. 

Dumbledore did not. Instead he said “You’ll find magical theory very much not a spell-heavy class. Most professors treat it mostly as pure lecture. I would hope you’d create a bit of a balance but I do understand if your abilities — ” 

“I’ll take it,” said Sirius, mostly to shut him up, “I’ll do it. I will.” 

He had realized in eight years Harry would come to Hogwarts. So he had to stick it out for at least eight years. 

“Wonderful,” said Dumbledore. Perhaps he had expected Sirius to put up a bigger fight. “I’ll discuss your appointment with the board of directors. They should be amenable… you know they love old blood.” 

That turned his stomach a bit. “Right.” 

“And they loved your book,” Dumbledore amended, seeing his averted eyes. “You may want to draft a few sample lesson plans I can present to them. I’m hoping to have you start after the Christmas holidays — January 5, would be the day. Please do owl me if you have — concerns or queries.” 

Sirius walked him out. He himself needed to go to the bodega for cigarettes and perhaps a bottle of wine. When he walked home alone it was quiet on the street and the wind was making a lovely sound in the eaves. Inside he sat at his desk and read over what he had already written for the American magic textbook: 

_A wonderful thing about being a witch or wizard is that so much of why we are who we are is yet unknown. There is still so much history — and even basic biology! — to learn and discover. In your lifetimes, new discoveries will be made that will render this textbook and probably all of your other textbooks obsolete. In fact, you may make some of these discoveries yourself!_

_Together, we will start from the basic building blocks of what make us who we are. Some of you may have started your education in a Muggle school and learned a little about DNA — the special material in all your cells, inherited from your parents which they inherited from their parents, containing information about who you are. What color are your eyes? Are your earlobes detached or attached? Can you roll your tongue? Do you have a widow’s peak, or a straight hairline? All these things are decided by DNA. And so is your magic!_

_Magic inheritance is complicated. Perhaps your parents are two wizards. Or, one is a wizard and one is a Muggle. Or, both your parents are Muggles. Just like your eyes aren’t super-blue if both of your parents have blue eyes, the strength and ability of your magic has nothing to do with your parentage. Simply the existence of your ability is cued by genetics. Remember, wizarding couples often have non-magic children, called Squibs. And some of the most famous, capable witches and wizards of all time, whose names you may recognize from your History of Magic classes, have been Muggle-born._

_Objects can also hold magic — for example, your wand. It’s a conduit for your ability, but it also holds magic of its own. Or, you may have been to famous landmarks that carry magical resonance. Where I’m from in Britain, we have many ancient castles and stone circles that are magically resonant. America’s most famous magically resonant landmark is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, in Arizona. Have you been to the Grand Canyon, or another magically resonant landmark (MRL)? What did you feel, when you were there? Magical theorists are still unclear as to why this is, or how this happens. We will talk about MRLs more in Chapter Four._

Then he had made some notes for upcoming sections: 

_spell-casting objects through the ages (rings/knives/etc)_

_instinctive magical ability eg “spiritus mundi”_

_ancient and prehistoric magic — evidence today (bring in american indian sites)_

_magical currents eg. ley lines and their significance in prehistory and today_

_the feeling of magical resonance / instinctive magic — base/blood magics key to understanding of how we harness our skills — conclusion_

He thought rather this seemed like a semester outline for a Hogwarts class, now that he was thinking about it critically. Eight years — he could stick it out for eight years. Eight years ago he had given Snape a hint he was still living down. Eight years meant when his first crop of first years graduated he would have to wait just another year. And perhaps somewhere in there he would be allowed to take a sabbatical. 

\--

He was brought before the Hogwarts Board of Trustees to present his CV and his lesson plans in progress just after Christmas 1983. He had photocopied all his paperwork in the magical theory department lounge in Oxford, having let himself in with Alphard’s keys, but it seemed the Hogwarts trustees had never before seen Xerox. Sirius was jittery with coffee and nerves but he suspected Dumbledore had given the trustees an ultimatum before he even entered the room. He tried to recall the tone and demeanor he would put on when wizarding daycare groups would come by the Auror office at the Ministry to meet the detectives except it was a bad month and as such he could not turn into a dog for their delight and amusement lest he wanted to puke and/or faint in front of them. 

“Most of the beginners’ textbooks in the field will walk students first through the basic biology,” Sirius began, “the sort of innate science behind magical ability determined through genetics, inheritance like anything else.” 

In the back corner Dumbledore’s fingers were thoughtfully steepled. His eyes glinted in the charmed lights moving like fat summer moths up above. Sirius quickly looked away. 

“I want to start here because I think it’s vital to the understanding and the craft. It gives students a different and I think broader understanding of their magic than they’ve been conceptualizing. And it’s an equalizer — it’s functionally concrete proof that disproves blood purist bigotry.” 

Someone coughed meaningfully from the back. Sirius ignored it. 

“Then I think we will move more into the great unknowns. I intend to actualize as much hands-on learning as I can — as can be funded, I suppose… trips, um, artifacts… There are quite a few magically resonant artifacts at the university museum in Edinburgh and a few more currently being researched there. And of course there are all the stone circles a few of which have already given me permission to bring a school group for a full day of guided exploration and study. And the standing stones and castles though those of course will require some negotiation with the respective research teams.” 

“I can get you close to Stonehenge with seventh years, I’m sure,” said a mousy woman from the front row. “Sharon Levy, the digmistress, is an old friend. She probably has more connections in the field she could share with you.” 

“Appreciated,” said Sirius. 

“I couldn’t help but notice Mr. Black that your seventh year final project here at Hogwarts was neither in the history nor the theory departments,” interjected a voice from the back. The accent was aristocratic and refined even more than Sirius knew his own was. The speaker wore his Ministry badge on a spotless lapel indicating he had come from work and yet Sirius did not recognize him. He remembered all the quasi-useless Ministry higher-ups in the late ‘70s had always made him think of Wire’s “Mr Suit.” “I did hear you made it out rather poorly from the war if you don’t mind my saying. Pardon me for wondering what so influenced the evolution of your academic interest.” 

Sirius’s seventh year project had been in the Herbology department, where he had attempted and miraculously succeeded to glean Hogwarts credit by cultivating assorted hallucinogenic plants that had been sacred to various and sundry worldwide wizarding cults throughout history. 

“My uncle was in the magical theory department at Oxford,” Sirius explained. “Dr. Alphard Lenoir. He passed in 1980 and most of his property fell to me. Many of us were dismissed from the Auror department after the war on account of — well, we all made it out rather poorly.” Here he faked as broad and bitter a smile as he could muster. “As such I’ve been continuing Dr. Lenoir’s work since then.” 

“I see,” said the Ministry man. 

“I would argue also that my seventh year project was chiefly anthropological in nature and thus not too far removed from my work now,” Sirius told him. At this he heard Dumbledore chuckle like a welcome rumble of distant thunder. 

“As long as you won’t be taking ayahuasca trips with the students,” said the Ministry man. 

“Perhaps just solo in my office after a long day.” 

A giggle from the mousy witch in the front row broke the strange tension into a stranger silence. Sirius recalled a scholarly article he had read recently regarding the treatment of several magic loss disorders — his own not among them, but regardless — with hallucinogenic compounds. The way Muggle doctors would coax a torn muscle back with rubber bands. 

“If that’s all,” said Dumbledore from the back row. Sirius went into the hallway and bit his nails wishing he had a cigarette (Dr. Menuck had advised him to quit) and listening to the soft rumble of deliberation inside until in under ten minutes the mousy witch came to the door to present him with a thick envelope containing his new hire paperwork. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Azkaban**   
_ March 1993 _

“Third time’s the charm,” said Dumbledore mildly from the door. At first Remus thought the voice had come from a dream, but he opened his eyes in time to see the thin spidery hand deposit another chalice of steaming potion inside his cell. The light was a thin grey and strange through the far window and he could not tell what time it was. He moved closer to the door in attempt to feel the soft light of Dumbledore’s Patronus. Like a pagan benediction. It lifted the black blanket just a little at the corner and Remus took a deep breath through his mouth to avoid the smell of the Wolfsbane. 

“You think — ” Dumbledore was patient while he coughed to reset his voice. “You think it’ll work this time?” 

“I’m certain.” 

The goblet was warm when he touched it and he pinched his nose and drank and when he had finished he clapped his hand over his mouth as always to keep from vomiting. Everything under his skin rebelled against it — his heart, his lungs, his belly all scorched, sore and twitching — but he felt, deep down, the animal’s resignation, its submission. With all the sick inside him curling up and lying down. 

“I’ll talk to Severus about doing something to improve the taste,” Dumbledore said. “Mint, perhaps.” 

“Right,” Remus said hoarsely. “Peppermint like a — what are those sweets from Honeydukes?” 

“Peppermint Pinwheels — yes, a favorite of mine as well. I’ll see what Severus can do. He may be loath to imbalance the materials at this delicate stage. But it certainly might make the potion more appealing to a broad audience.” He smiled at Remus coldly with no teeth through the bars. “See you evening after next.” 

\--

On the evening preceding the full moon Dumbledore arrived again with his contingent of Ministry representatives and their veritable zoo of Patronuses glimmering and nervous and vigilant in that dark place. Remus had felt all day that something was different. There was the horrible pulling stretching taffy soreness of his bones and the wrongness of his skin and his head ached but the fog in it was lessened drastically. Usually by dusk he had begun to think of blood — rats’ blood, human blood, the gruesome black ichor he imagined as his master’s blood, Dementors’ blood, fear’s blood… Now he was thinking, energized by the presence of the blue ghosts in the door, of the questions he would ask Dumbledore when this was all over, and he was watching at the blurred glow of the moon just beneath the horizon. 

When he had a few minutes left he stood gingerly and undressed. “How do you feel, Remus,” Dumbledore asked. 

“Fine.” 

“How so fine?” 

“Sore but not — ” He felt almost wild. His mind was so clear he could feel it running like a cold stream, and his hands were trembling. He indicated his head, and then he showed his teeth. “You all don't look as delicious to me as you normally do.” 

Two of them spooked, stepping back. He felt the fearful flicker of their Patronuses. Dumbledore only smirked. Remus folded his uniform atop the wool blanket in the corner and sat again against the wall, hugging his knees to his chest and watching at the drain in the floor, and counted to one-hundred. He could feel their eyes and their whispers and their intention. When he got to seventy he felt his body start to change. It pulled and stretched and moved; the bones detached and reattached and multiplied and shrunk and expanded, the muscle and the connective tissue moved around them, orchestral and conducted by some mad scientist, his skin changed and burst, his jaw shoved out and the teeth shoved through his gums… The hurt, of course, was like normal but absent was the fear — the shock, the disorientation — and a strange serenity remained. 

He closed his eyes. Seventy-one. Seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four — 

He pushed himself up. His arms and legs were not as normal. In the tiny dark room there were more smells. 

Seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven —

They were speaking in the door. “Is he — ” 

“Shh,” Dumbledore directed, like some perverse librarian. 

Remus sat on haunches and opened his eyes. The watchers in the door developed in black and white. 

“Remus,” said Dumbledore, and Remus cocked his head. He could feel his ears move where his eyebrows usually did. The smile spreading slow as butter across the face in the window was a sight he could not stand. So he turned his head toward the other side of the cell and found suddenly there was a corpse in it. 

His cry of surprise was a tiny bark. First he shrank back toward the corner then he went to the body drawn by a rapidly surmounting horrified curiosity. They must have put it in with him when his eyes were closed. It was lying on its belly but he rolled it with his nose and a paw. It was Sirius. Or it almost was — it had been. Most of the face was gone. The long dark hair stuck in the brutal tearing wounds. 

He had done this, he was certain; he did not remember how, but he had done it. Perhaps last time and they had saved it for him — but it was still warm. He nosed the shoulder and what remained of the jaw and cheek and the high-pitched desperate whining in the back of his throat he heard like the roaring of the sea in his ears — like a horrible squeaking static, like a broken machine. He had feared this since he was eleven years old and how he was thirty-three and he had done it. At last he had done it and of course he had done it because it had been inevitable. He had laid awake convincing himself it would never be and then it was — like all things. 

They were speaking in the door. He didn’t care. Did they want to see if he would eat it? Was that some measure of his lucidity? He wanted to lick clean the hollows where the eyes had been which wept blood; it seemed right, yet he knew they would take it the wrong way. He could do it in the morning when he was human again. He curled up and rested his head upon the corpse’s chest and for the first time he could see himself — this body. Strong legs, big paws, russet coat with soft white underfur around the belly — where the bite was, in his human self. He wondered if this was what he had always looked like, and he shut his eyes. He could not actualize the wholeness inside his mind. The bigness — the endlessness of what he had done. It was just a big black spot. In the morning there would be reckoning, he understood. He could hear himself, endless echoing mournful whining, sad as bagpipes. 

“What’s wrong with it,” said a voice in the door. Remus opened his eyes. Across the cell on the wool blanket with his clothes now there was another corpse — smaller, younger. Shock of dark hair. School robes. He shut his eyes again. 

It could not be — it could not be. He entertained he was dreaming. But he had entertained that in court in 1981. And he had entertained it four days before the trial, when he had gone to Godric’s Hollow, and he had found the bodies. 

He would not get up, he told himself; if he got up they would take Sirius away, and besides he already knew who the other body belonged to, and he could tell it was dead, because he could smell it. He could smell all the everything beginning to rot away inside like fallen fruit. Orchard of corpses — so help him he remembered Guern — 

As if summoned the door opened — _opened_ , for the first time in almost twelve years — and Greyback came in. Human somehow, squat, his big red hands glimmering with his stolen rings. As ever like the bastard brother of some royalty ripe to be humiliated and deposed. So there must have been another potion they were testing, or else he had made some Faustian bargain. Remus barked and barked and barked and then he howled. He wanted to be screaming but this throat wouldn’t manage it. 

_Relinquo servitutem_ , he thought, _et libertas mea_. 

“You’d better tranquilize it, Albus,” someone whispered.

“There’s no need,” said Greyback. He came close — he held his hand out to Remus, to sniff or to kiss, the way one would approach a strange dog. Remus growled; he squared himself over Sirius’s body. He could do nothing for Harry but in the end he never had. God, he never had. “No need, no need.” The voice was gentle and the hand smelled like blood and the teeth when he smiled were black and crooked and there was red grist stuck in them, vivid ropey viscera. 

Perhaps there was one potion that took away the transformation, and another that took away the bloodlust, and they could be mixed and matched. And they had tested one on Greyback, and they had tested the other on Remus. 

“We need to see what he’s doing,” came Dumbledore’s voice from the door. “Remus?” 

He barked toward the sound. _Shut the fuck up, can’t you see —_

“I missed you,” Greyback singsonged, “Remus, lovely — ” 

He lunged over the body — he heard his claws clatter on the floor. Indistinguishable shouts from the door. Yet Greyback was faster — he was by Harry’s corpse now in the far corner. He clattered his rings. He was grinning wider now like some atavistic berserker and his teeth were slick with blood. 

“I suppose now you have no reason to stay human,” he said. “God, it was sweet to have you… even if only in part. If only in body and not in mind.” 

Greyback crouched — he reached for the corpse, for the scar Remus knew, had seen upon the forehead in the crib in the house at Godric’s Hollow, 1981 — and Remus lunged again. This time he felt the spell like a steel trap on his back legs. Biting, biting, swallowing. He could still hear Greyback as he laughed and laughed and then only darkness. And the sound of the darkness like breeze in a veil. 

\--

In the morning he woke already transformed spread-eagled on his belly in the middle of the cell. He scrambled to his feet so fast his vision turned black and he had to clutch the wall for support but of course the room had been emptied of its corpses and scrubbed down of their blood. He knew they could do this; they had a freshwater hose they would blast indiscriminately and with no warning through each of the cells when all the unwashed bodies started stinking in the short brutal summer, and they would do it when there had been a particularly inventive suicide. 

Dumbledore was in the door. “What happened,” said Remus, breathless with terror, “what happened to the bodies.” 

“What bodies.” 

“S — ” He couldn’t say it. “S — and — ”

“There were no bodies.” 

“I saw them.” 

“You had nightmares,” said Dumbledore, “I’ve owled Severus; it happens to do with the balance and quantity of dragon bile.” 

“They were — it was real. I touched them. Greyback was — ” 

He realized the impossibility as he said it. Unless something truly improbable had happened Greyback was likely still wanted in most European nations for turning children. Of course it had been a dream. 

“Dragon bile is a powerful analgesic used in many potions and visceral night terrors are a completely normal effect of overdose,” said Dumbledore. “It shouldn’t happen again.” 

It had been so very very real, Remus thought. He sat, tugging the wool blanket into his lap. Sirius’s broken face. _I suppose now you have no reason to stay human…_

“How do you feel?” Dumbledore asked. “I expect you’re a bit shaken…” 

“A — yes. A _bit_.” 

Sore. Sick — hungry, as always, starved, nausea stirring bile in the emptiness. As ever, the barest truth — like he had been disassembled and rebuilt by someone or something with no mind for his consciousness. 

“What was it like to be yourself in that body?” 

“To be honest the experience was rather colored by all the gore and terror.” 

“Understandably.” 

“Do I always — have I always looked, is that what I look like?” 

“Yes,” said Dumbledore, “that I’ve seen. Does that count as one of your questions?” 

“No,” said Remus, trying to keep the panic from his voice; he could not afford to waste one. 

“I thought not.” Dumbledore smiled, friendly this time, but it twisted something tighter in Remus’s gut. “You have five remaining, yes?” 

“Yes, um, who of the Order is still alive?” 

The smile twisted, as it always did. “Remus, you cannot possibly have thought I would answer that question.” Remus bit his lip and waited, and indeed Dumbledore continued. “You know that Sirius is and that I am. There are ten or so of us now. Though two of those ten will never leave the Permanent Spell Damage wing at St. Mungo’s.” 

He wondered who those two were and what had happened to them and he wondered if one could be Sirius. But Dumbledore had said, _under my auspices…_

“Alright,” said Remus, “what happened to Voldemort?” 

“He is fled. As befits his name. There was no body, as you recall. Rumors have abounded in the interim and I have checked up on quite a few of them but none have held true. But there have been disappearances — strangeness of all sorts.” Dumbledore narrowed his lips; he seemed to be debating whether he should go further. “As I’m sure you’ve assumed your master will be back. He bides his time.” 

“He is not my master.” 

“Pardon me,” said Dumbledore; “I forget there is another who bears the extreme honor of that title.” 

He wondered if Dumbledore understood the memory was like a hot brand. It burnt with fever and it was inviolable and it was etched upon his very soul. “Where is he — where’s Greyback?” 

“Ah,” said Dumbledore, tenting his fingers. “In 1981 he was himself awaiting trial in Norway. Our Ministry was looking to extradite him and indeed it is likely if he was tried in the UK he would have been sent to Azkaban for assorted turnings and murders and also his declared collusion with Lord Voldemort. However the Ministry was desperate for witnesses in your case and he volunteered to testify against you in exchange for a trial and imprisonment in Norway where he indeed was indicted on charges of turning four children one of whom died of her injuries. In December of ’81 he was sent to the wizard prison shared by all the Scandinavian nations on the arctic island of Ingoya. From which he escaped with the help of his pack in 1985. Since then — well, one may quite simply follow the trail of missing and murdered children… which currently ends in the South of France. Camargue district — the salt flats. I am certain he will not come back to the United Kingdom until Voldemort’s return. Which could be any day, theoretically.” 

Camargue district — the walled city on the salt flats from the dream the month previous. He had dreamed in Greyback’s mind once or twice before in 1980 and ’81 but never anything so consequential. Remus rested his forehead on his knees. He had wondered in his more lucid moments for many years why Greyback had testified against him and at last he understood. Faustian bargain indeed. 

“Will that be all, then, Remus?” 

“Yes,” he said, muffled, “that’s all.” 

He felt the Patronus fade when Dumbledore left and in not ten minutes they had regained the door. He realized dimly they must’ve been desperate for him in his despair the night previous and now they were overcompensating. They pressed what they could of their ghost flesh toward him until his mind blacked out but for the twisted animal memory of laying his head on Sirius’s chest and feeling no heartbeat. 

\--

Sometimes he remembered certain nice things but he was certain they only let him so he could remember how royally he later fucked everything up. Like his flat in London with Sirius — they had moved in together three days after Hogwarts graduation. June 1978. They had told James and Peter they had decided to live together because between the two of them even with Sirius’s inheritance they had limited funds and while that was indeed part of it the other part was the big secret thing, perhaps not-so-secret after all, which was that it was going to be rather special to fuck whenever they wanted. They would no longer have to think of some elaborate prank and/or ruse to get Peter out of the room while James was at Quidditch practice, nor would they have to seek out other clandestine locales on the Hogwarts campus, which they had frequented for a while before nearly getting caught by Filch (that had ruled out broom closets) and before Remus fell off a desk and smashed his elbow such that even with Sirius’s rudimentary healing spells it had felt like jelly for a week (that had ruled out empty classrooms). Once they had stumbled into the Room of Requirement but had found the chest of drawers filled entirely with intimidating sex toys more than a little creepy and had left post-haste. 

The new apartment was boiling hot even with all the windows thrown open and it was dusk by the time they had brought everything up from the street, returned the moving van to the lot, and bought cold noodles for dinner from the Vietnamese restaurant on the corner; still there was no electricity, so they lit candles and ate with their fingers and fucked on the bare wood floor in the half-moonlight and the fluorescents from the street and the city symphony streaming screaming through the windows, klaxons and shouts and laughter and music; someone was waiting at the light outside playing the Stones — “summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy” — at the long liquid moment when Remus came, and into the moment just afterwards where it almost hurt: loving someone something someplace so much it was like his heart was on marionette strings. Sirius got up, he was long lithe lovely and he had taken his sweaty hair down and it stuck on his forehead and across his neck in the irrepressible humidity, and he went to the turntable and put on Eno’s “Baby’s On Fire.” He only did this when he was feeling particularly sexually ravenous. Remus bent his knees up; in the eight months or so they had been doing this he had learned how to put a bug in Sirius’s ear simply by suggestion. “Can you come again,” said Sirius, kneeling on the wood floor between Remus's knees; “Do you want to?” He had this look on his face like, please say yes. So Remus said, yes. He could never resist that look Sirius got on sometimes when they were together which suggested he couldn’t believe his luck. Nobody had ever looked at him like that before in his life. Probably nobody ever would again but he didn’t think about it like that in those days. 

The first time they had gone to bed together they were both a little stoned and Sirius had practically ripped Remus’s robes and shirt off and pressed his whole open mouth against the scar on Remus’s side, then the one on his neck, with a passion that suggested somewhere he truly believed he could erase them with his own brand if he simply could summon enough will. “I’ve wanted — ” he whispered, between licks, sucks, delicate wet pressure of his mouth on Remus’s skin, “Moony, for so long.” 

Like he had suffered every moment he had not had it, which Remus supposed he had, because himself he had too. And he did still. 

Sirius’s tongue — pink velvet wet, like moss, like a feather — against-inside his thigh, the thick blue vein, life, life, their tandem heartbeat. Lower ever slick inside him he pulled his knees to his chest he was crying because in the wild decadent excess of feeling there was nothing else to do. His heartbeat in his ears sounded like here-here-here I am here-here-here. Outside there were drunks shouting on the street. 

They slept on the floor in each other’s arms; he woke at dawn and feigned sleep while Sirius brushed his hair back from his forehead, tucking it gently behind his ear, tracing Remus’s eyebrow with his thumb, “Love you, Moony, love you, Moony love.” 

\--

The fourth trial was no different but for one piece he later supposed he should have expected. Late on the full-moon afternoon he felt again the peaceful clarity as he lay curled up naked on his wool blanket, eyes closed, listening absently to Dumbledore and his gathered witnesses conferring in the door. His head was clear but everything else hurt. Bones — skin. Everything inside shifting and compressing. Moving to fit. 

“How do you feel, Remus?” Dumbledore asked just before moonrise. 

“Fine,” he whispered, lying. “Sore.” 

Notes were scratched on tablets. It was beginning to be clear perhaps this hurt was wrong. He shut his eyes and set to counting and by the time he reached fifty all the peaceful clarity was thoroughly bulldozed by the pain. He thought he screamed but couldn’t hear it. For all he had spent twelve years being tortured all that suffering had been of another kind and for all he had spent twenty-eight years ripping apart and being resewn at least the pain of transformation was sharp and raw, and it was quick, and then it was over. This was none of the above. Dimly he felt the usual inside all of it, the stretching and pulling, the rearrangement, the bristling under his skin — hurting so mild it was almost good. 

He was sobbing, but it was the wolf whimpering, hiding its face with its paw, contorting its body in useless attempt to escape the agony. Finally he pressed his face to the cold stone floor against the burning consuming heat. His flank was heaving tremblingly. In the window they were speaking, and he heard again whichever clueless shitstain always asked the same fucking question — “What’s wrong with it?” 

“Dragon bile,” said Dumbledore exasperatedly. 

“You’ve got to knock it out again, Albus,” said someone else. “This is torture.” 

Torture, Remus thought in whatever corner of his brain was still functioning beyond a silent and sustained scream. What made this torture beyond anything else? It seemed rather like the inevitable physical equivalent of everything he had been put through since November 1981. All-seeking dissecting knife-claws this time in his flesh rather than his mind. It was worse than _Crucio_. It was worse than waking up in St. Mungo’s the day they lifted the magical coma, January 1979. It was probably what it would have been like had they actually put electricity to him, flogged him, vivisected him in search of his evil humors, all at once, over and over for twelve years, rather than simply probing his mind in order to let his memories do all that with but a fraction of the blood. Certainly the latter methodology was a great deal cleaner. Perhaps it had taken them years of practice to perfect it. 

Something inside him was gnawing away at his very substance. Like a thousand cockroaches or termites with a rabid famine hunger for his organs and his flesh. He would have to die because after this there could be no living. They had finished with his mind and how they took what was left of him.

When Dumbledore tranquilized him it was not so much that it went away as that it swallowed him up and he lived at the bottom of it, and it held him in its arms and rocked. 

\--

He woke in a knot at the memory of pain having stretched back out of his wolfness hardly feeling it. By the light it was midday. Dumbledore was still waiting in the door. “Alright?”he asked, when he saw Remus’s eyes flutter open. 

“Yes.” His throat was so raw and ragged from the screaming and the howling he knew there would be no fixing the hoarseness of his voice. “Dragon bile,” he said. 

“Yes, I’m afraid,” Dumbledore said. “The dose must be calculated with precision.” 

Snape had almost definitely done all of this on purpose, Remus thought, as his own belated vengeance for Lily. “It felt like being eaten alive by insects.” 

Dumbledore scratched that down upon his notepad. “Interesting.” 

In Remus’s first year, Dumbledore had invited him to his office after some full moons and Fawkes would come sit on the arm of his chair and shed a tear or two on the worst wounds and Dumbledore would ask, how are you feeling? How are your classes? How goes your transformation? How are your friends? He had had the same notepad, but he had never written anything down. He had listened to Remus talk and he had nodded sagely and he had doled out thoughtful advice about friendships and about secrecy and mnemonic devices for difficult Arithmancy formulas. When Remus got up to leave Dumbledore would walk him to the door with a hand on his shoulder. 

He tried to sit but couldn’t. He had to consciously try bit by bit to relax each muscle. “Have you anything — ” he tried, knowing what the answer would be. 

“No,” said Dumbledore, as predicted. How different everything was now. “Have you a question?” 

He had been too preoccupied by everything to even think of one but in that moment — perhaps it was that rare and shining memory — it calcified in his mind as if he had known it always. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked it before. “Have you ever doubted? That it was me, have you ever doubted I’m guilty?” 

Dumbledore just looked at him. How pathetic he was sure he was. He couldn’t move for the memory of pain even to cover his nakedness, his scars, his crooked tattoos, his evidence, evidence, evidence, and the light that threw across him was cold. He could smell that in the night he had pissed himself. Now the mantra repeated by itself even when they weren’t present; it had been carven upon his soul, and it looped like a broken record: 

_You will never leave this place_

_You will never kill your master_

_You will never kill the rat_

“I won’t answer that,” Dumbledore said. He was imperious in the door like a golem or a nightmare and the strange light of his Patronus made his skin seem thin and ghostly. It hurt — a distant half-blow after all that night’s agony — but Remus could not say he was entirely surprised. “Will that be all?” 

\--

He sat with Lucius Malfoy on mismatched chairs at a table outside a shuttered cafe. From some open window he heard the lilting melancholy of accordion music, laughter — in the air was smoke and salt. Malfoy had brought caramel candies one of which he offered and the hands Remus dreamed in took it. Then Malfoy spread out upon the table a laminated and highly detailed map of the Scottish coast. 

“Yes,” Remus said, in not-his-voice. “We’ve known about the facilities near Oban since the last war. We scouted the bunker and the woods around thoroughly but found nothing. We suspected it was a dummy location — perhaps formerly in use but now vacant.” 

“I assure you if it was vacant then it is no longer. In fact it would be a great embarrassment for the Ministry if the truth of it were to come to light,” said Lucius, choosing words carefully. “We are thinking in the present and indeed rather liminal moment it is perhaps best to leverage it for political ends.” 

“How so?” 

“When he regains his body we could accomplish very much in not much time were select of us in positions of power.” 

“You mean yourself.” 

“I do of course mean myself. I can put forward motions to have the Lestranges and Dolohov released from Azkaban. Perhaps we should also let Lupin out, to maintain the illusion… there’s a cellar at Malfoy Manor that might suit him. There’s a new protest group challenging the admissibility of Veritaserum use in the Wizengamot and as it was employed to great effect in all their trials that seems to me like a way in.” 

It was strange to hear his name spoken and to be presented as a bargaining chip in this distant and removed conversation, and it was even stranger to hear the voice that he dreamed in speak about himself as though it were not himself. “I will take care of Lupin should the need arise.” 

“Of course,” said Malfoy uncomfortably. He was a man morbidly intrigued by the inner workings of werewolf packs and in fact he collected artifacts and memorabilia but he did not like to face the truth of it head-on. Or perhaps he liked it a bit too much. Gently he brushed cigarette ash from his lap so as not to stain his fine linen trousers. “What I require from you is to mobilize all the part-humans you can find against the Ministry. Everything you should need is in here — ”

He passed a large envelope across the table to Greyback who Remus dreamed in. The meaty hands undid the clasp and reached in and pulled out a few Muggle polaroids which would require further study in the light as now they appeared to show only blood, gore, torn things, skin and grist, fur and hair matted with viscera. The heart Remus dreamed in slammed against the ribs like a door. 

“How do you mean mobilize,” said Greyback. 

“However you desire… protest groups, leaflets, guerrilla warfare… I don’t care if you take a page from the IRA’s book, Fenrir; just give them as big a fright as you can manage.” 

Something bubbled in his chest — laughter or nausea, or a scream. Instead of it he woke. The stars — the waning aching moonlight stretching upon the stone. He turned toward the hungry ghost in the door. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Hogwarts**   
_ August 1987 _

An American witch, vampire, age fifteen, had moved to Bristol with her family (after, of course, all the necessary wizarding immigration proceedings) and applied with all the appropriate paperwork to transfer into Hogwarts as a fifth year. She had top grades from Newmeadows Alternative Witchery Academy on Bainbridge Island, Washington, which nobody had ever heard of but which turned out to be highly regarded as the best women’s magic school in the American Northwest. She wrote: 

_As for my vampirism I was turned just after my premature birth in a confused blood transfusion in Seattle’s since-shuttered Brantley Byreworth Clinic. I mostly survive off goat’s, cow’s, and sheep’s blood. Once or twice a year I do have to consume human blood to survive but I have never bitten a person. I have an account on file with Western American Vampiress’s Health Services in Denver at which I can order blood from willing human donors. My parents and siblings have also generously shared blood with me. I have done much research about the politics and methodology of blood sharing in the United Kingdom and am in communication with Birmingham Bloodbank, who will accept my account from WAVHS and will be my blood suppliers in the UK._

_I would very much like to continue my study at one of the wizarding world’s most respected academies of magic however I understand your acceptance of part-human students varies on a case by case basis and none of us have been admitted since 1971. Please accept my enclosed Newmeadows transcript, writing samples, and personal essay. I am happy to answer any and all correspondence and/or to meet with faculty, administration, or trustees at Hogwarts or another location._

_Yours sincerely, Amelia Nguyen_

A meeting was called with the faculty, staff, and board. Amelia Nguyen’s writing samples included a fabulous essay about the magical resonance of Mount Rainier and Sirius, who was plotting a three-day December visit with his fifth year class to the stone circles of Cornwall, went to the meeting prepared to vouch for a promising student who happened to require to drink human blood. Usually about three board members showed up to any meetings regarding school matters so Sirius was surprised when he came up to the conference chamber a few minutes early to find the room already packed with folks he hadn’t seen since his hiring, including Mr. Suit from the Ministry, whose small eyes followed Sirius as he found one of the last remaining seats. 

At precisely 10:30 AM Greenwich Mean Time Dumbledore cleared his throat and the room fell into an uneasy silence. 

“We are faced with a difficult decision concerning on one hand a young witch who is clearly brilliant and on the other a longstanding tradition put into place for the safety of our students,” he said. “Hogwarts’ last part-human student was admitted in 1971 — ” around the table, whispers abounded — “a full year before Amelia’s birth and subsequent turning. I think this is as good an opportunity as any for us to consider creating a firm policy surrounding part-human admittance. But I understand several members of our board and staff have prepared remarks and as such I defer to them. If you would begin, Mr. Smith.” 

The Ministry man, who was seated four down from Sirius, leaned forward on his elbows and opened with a beringed hand a leather folder containing a legal notepad on which he had jotted text in a practiced, sharp, and scarcely legible script. There was no way, Sirius thought, that his name really was Mr. Smith. 

“Certainly, headmaster,” said the Ministry man. “None of those gathered around this table will forget that the last part-human student Hogwarts admitted was the werewolf traitor Remus Lupin.” 

It was never not like being sledgehammered once in the chest and once in the back of the head. Sirius looked down at his hands in his lap which he had squeezed together tight enough to hurt. 

“An unofficial policy was adopted by the governing bodies of Hogwarts in 1982, ten months after Lupin’s imprisonment in Azkaban, to disallow part-human students from enrollment until some compromise could be effectively found. Part-human applicants are so few and far between that no conversation was ever had on the subject and as such, when faced with our first part-human applicant in sixteen years, we find ourselves in dire need to make an appropriate decision for this unique age in British wizarding culture that will likely have precedent upon the next several hundred years of Hogwarts enrollment.” 

“Hear hear,” said the potions professor, Sirius’s least favorite living human being, Mortimer Sanderson. 

“My argument, and I will be happy to be the sort of spokesperson for this faction if the need should arise, is that we work with other European wizarding schools to connect with some wealthy donors and open a special academy for part-human students only. We can hire primarily part-human instructors and staff, enlist a part-human board of directors, et cetera. There is currently a land grant project underway on the Scottish Isle of Coll that may be promising to pursue. This way we can assure the safety of human students and facilitate meaningful education for part-human students, which seems to me like an effective compromise.” 

Thoughtfully Mr. Smith folded down his legal pad pages and closed his leather folder. Silence ensued. 

“It would be inadmissible in Muggle court,” said Sirius finally. 

“I wasn’t aware, Mr. Black,” said Mr. Smith with a smile in the corner of his mouth, “that this was Muggle court.” 

Sirius ignored that. “Separate but equal doesn’t count. I know many of you don’t pay attention to Muggle politics but I thought the American civil rights movement was like, fairly interesting.” 

Across the room Pomona Sprout met his eyes and sagely nodded. Elsewhere a cavalcade of whispers abounded. 

“I understand you’d prepared some remarks, Sirius,” said Dumbledore. 

Indeed he had, though he had no leather-bound folder. He took the tightly folded sheet of parchment from the back pocket of his jeans and spread it out flat upon the table. “I wanted to speak in Amelia’s defense because I want her in my class,” he said to a bit of polite laughter. “Her grades are wonderful and her writing is brilliant and clearly she is very smart. Being who she is has forced her to be very responsible and self-possessed and it’s forced her to work to outperform her peers — to prove herself.” 

He had decided not to mention Remus in his argument though easily he could have. The way Remus would come back from the library sometimes in their seventh year past two AM and climb into Sirius’s bed smelling like ink and parchment with his hands cold so tired and woozy and hungry having skipped dinner that Sirius could feel under his own hands the heart beating and the belly rumbling and all the bones and blood trying ever to rest. Sometimes he found quite simply being at Hogwarts a renewed torture, on which occasions he confined himself to his chambers or his classroom on the fifth floor where as a student he had never once set foot and poured himself a generous drink. 

“Amelia like many part-human students was made how she is by no fault of her own. I don’t think we should blame her for the actions of others. And I think her presence at Hogwarts can teach other students about meaningfully combating systemic oppression by opening their arms and their hearts… as we have begun to successfully combat blood purism and other antiquated bigotries in the wizarding community.” 

“Albus made the same argument about Lupin in ’71,” said Mortimer Sanderson. 

“It can’t be proven he was radicalized at or before Hogwarts,” Sirius said, probably too loudly. From four seats down Mr. Smith was watching him. “Those of Voldemort’s followers who weren’t born into radical blood purist households —” _like my own_ , he bit back — “were those who were left out, abandoned, shunted to the corners by wizarding society…” 

“He was never _shunted_ to the corners of wizarding society,” said Mr. Smith. The placidity had not faded from his aristocratic face. Under the table Sirius clenched his hands still a little tighter. “The truth of the matter is we still don’t know how or when it happened and now he is beyond speaking on the subject.” 

Sirius could taste blood in his mouth. Imagination unbidden: Remus as ravening madman in some Bedlamite snakepit, screaming and rocking and decreeing in unlanguage, naked and chained to the floor. 

“Perhaps we should get back to the matter at hand,” said Dumbledore gently. “I tend toward agreement with Sirius that comparing Amelia to Remus is unproductive at best. Her case is clearly a different one.” 

“The International Vampiric Council has also declared full neutrality in all wizarding conflicts,” said the Magical Creatures professor, Lorenzen. “Only one of the twelve British bands pledged loyalty to He Who Must Not Be Named in the war and they had a bone to pick with the Ministry after John Latham’s botched staking in ’66.” 

“The issue is with precedent,” said Mr. Smith. “If we let in a vampire we are obliged to let in other part-humans whether or not they’re of declared neutral parties.” 

“If we let in Blacks and Lestranges and Malfoys who are certain to leave Hogwarts and pledge eternal allegiance to the nearest Dark wizard then it seems to me we need to give part-humans the benefit of the doubt,” said Sirius. “By 1975 half of Slytherin house was talking about leaving Hogwarts and joining ranks with You Know Who. Indeed many of them did and are now in Azkaban.” 

“You’re a Black, Sirius,” Dumbledore reminded gently, as though Sirius had forgotten. 

“Indeed, and based on my family’s track record if you were worried about radicalization I shouldn’t’ve been enrolled.” 

“Then we would’ve lost a hero of the war,” said Mr. Smith, for some reason. 

“I’m just suggesting it seems useless to be hung up on what Remus did when it seems Dark allegiance is statistically more endemic to a couple ancient inbred families than to any part-human party. And I’m suggesting we likely are losing a heroine of the next war by barring a genius student from Hogwarts.” 

“My issue,” said Mortimer Sanderson loudly, “is with her safety.” 

Sirius bit his lip and tried to keep from rolling his eyes. 

“And with the safety of other students. She says she has never bitten a human. Can we trust her word? And besides, fifth year and onward can be deeply stressful times what with OWLs and NEWTs and many studies have shown vampiric thirst for human blood increases under stress.” 

“I contacted Newmeadows,” said Professor Sprout. “They all vouched for Amelia. The headmistress offered to Floo here to plead her case. They are a highly regarded and selective magical academy and most of their like in America will admit vampires, werewolves, centaurs, ghosts, what-have-you. I taught a semester at a school in Louisiana where half the students were kelpies.” 

“The Americans have not had a full-scale wizarding war since the Plains Purges in the 1870s,” said Mr. Smith. “They have done over a century of healing, negotiation, and integration since that time. For us it has been six years. We are in the first stages of this process and we need to start with a groundwork.” 

Quasi-silence intercut by grumbling. Sirius folded his page of notes and tucked it back in his jeans pocket. 

“It seems to me that our dilemma right now is between Mr. Smith’s point and Mr. Black’s,” said Dumbledore. “Lobbying for the opening of a new part-human exclusive magic academy or simply admitting Amelia and setting precedent for all part-humans to attend Hogwarts. Shall we take a quick vote and see where loyalties lie?” 

They voted by raised hands tallied by Dumbledore, who himself did not vote, and they were exactly tied. 

“We will reconvene next week for a final hearing,” Dumbledore said, “same time, same place, say, next Thursday? Each faction should have a full proposal and contingency plan for their notion including sources, evidence, et cetera. We will hear presentations — under ten minutes, please — and then we will vote once more. Fair?” 

Further grumblings, tending toward the affirmative. The meeting was adjourned. Sirius got up, scraping his chair; his palms were sweaty, he was jittery with coffee, and with a very old and brutal unfocused anger he couldn’t shake. For the first time in years he was back on the same hopeless line — whyever would Remus do it? When did he get turned around and how? And of course that wasn’t a very far throw from, perhaps Remus hadn’t done it after all. Which was a notion he had not dared to entertain now for almost six years. 

He went to the staff kitchen and made another pot of coffee and filled the pitcher of cream and found the sugar cubes. It had been a very good month for his magic so he put a charm on the pot to keep it hot and floated the tray beside him all the way down to the library where Pomona Sprout was already elbow-deep in a selection of epic, seemingly handwritten Hogwarts histories. Madam Pince was still in Majorca so they were alone in the great cavernous whispering room, and as such Sirius did not doubt Pomona had been smoking a joint. She didn’t even look up when he came in. “You don’t need so much as another thimbleful of coffee, Black,” she said, licking her finger to turn a page. 

“I’m going to need another whole pot if we need to go through all those volumes.” 

At this she looked up, holding her place on the page with a long dirty fingernail. Sirius saw the date in the top left corner — _School Year 1657-8_. Thoughtfully she moved her pince-nez down her long nose. “On the contrary,” she said. “You won’t like this, but it could help. Perhaps part of our presentation should be demonstrating Lupin was altogether a relatively normal boy when he was at school.” 

“What if they pull out — ” Sirius squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “What if they — the Snape thing.” 

“Those records, Poppy’s records, the complaint, et cetera, they were all expunged. Questionably admissibly under the bylaws I might add so Albus won’t bring them up. Besides Severus is in Papua New Guinea on some neocolonialist quest to document — all these traditional potions, I don’t know; he’s out of the loop on this complete situation. And besides besides as I understand it that whole affair was your fault anyway.” 

“It’s true,” said Sirius. 

Pomona looked back into the book and readjusted her pince-nez. “You should owl the Ministry and request his trial transcript and then you should find all his student work on file in this library.” 

“His old essays and all that are still here?” 

“Yes,” Sprout said, “sometimes the odder of the students will sneak in here at night to read them. And his seventh year project is indeed a rather important piece of oral history.” 

Said project Sirius had “proofread” whilst on mushrooms. May 1978. He had been thinking about ends and about how ends were really beginnings. Remus, who had put off sampling any of Sirius’s project all year, had at last succumbed. James and Peter were in the library scrambling to finish theirs and as such Sirius and Remus went to the top of the astronomy tower with a joint against the psychedelic nausea. The sex that transpired was either the worst or best of Sirius’s life. 

“He was a normal boy,” said Sirius to Pomona, “of course he was a normal boy.” 

His hands felt full of static. Too much magic. He had prepared the magic calming potion the day previous and had used the last of his supply of mothwings. 

Pomona turned a page and the paper sound rustled some sharp and fraying thread of nostalgia. “Go owl the Ministry,” she said. “And you should sign the request with my name.” 

\--

Sirius’s owl arrived back from the Ministry three days later tapping on the window of his office, holding a thick and official-looking envelope. Sirius read the cover page first: 

_Dear Pomona Sprout,_

_Enclosed please find the transcript of the November 4 1981 trial of Remus John Lupin. This transcript is property of the United Kingdom Ministry of Magic Department of Criminal Justice and will self-immolate after 24 hours or earlier if copying spells are attempted upon the parchment. Unauthorized publishing and/or copying will result in a fine and/or a sentence of community service and probation._

_This trial lasted one hour. The jury settled unanimously on a guilty verdict after a six minute deliberation. The accused was sentenced to life in Azkaban for the murders of Peter Yardleigh Pettigrew and four unknown Muggles, as accomplice to the murders of James Harriman Potter and Lily Evans Potter, and as an associate of the Dark wizard known as He Who Must Not Be Named._

_Selections of this transcript, as well as names of certain witnesses and court staff, have been redacted for security reasons by the Minister of Magic, the Head of the Department of Criminal Justice, and the Head of the Department of Part-Human Affairs._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Lauralyn MacIver  
_ _Court Clerk_

The accompanying packet despite the alleged hour-long trial constituted only five or so pages with all its redactions. Sirius opened the lowest drawer of his desk and removed his bottle of scotch and poured three fingers into an unwashed glass tumbler. Then he started reading. 

\--

_OPENING REMARKS FROM THE DEFENSE  
_ _[ redacted ]_

_OPENING REMARKS FROM THE PROSECUTION  
_ _Your honor, Judge [ redacted ], and witches and wizards of the jury. We gather here today for a solemn but bittersweet occasion — and for an opportunity to seek justice for a heinous crime. Justice which has been all too rare in the years of the war with He Who Must Not Be Named…_

Statements to this effect Sirius had read about six million times since November 1981 in the _Prophet_ and assorted historical reviews and was sure he could practically recite without reading. As such he skipped over the remainder of the opening remarks. 

_Veritaserum is administered to the defendant by Bailiff [ redacted ]. The prosecution calls Witness #1, MLE officer [ redacted ], to the stand. Veritaserum is administered by Bailiff [ redacted ]._

_QUESTIONING OF WITNESS #1_

_PROSECUTION  
_ _Where were you stationed on the evening of November 2, 1981?_

_WITNESS #1  
_ _I was stationed in Brixton with a full squad. The MLE was encamped throughout the city in search of Lupin._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _When did you see him?_

_WITNESS #1  
_ _Around midnight. We had split up to cover more ground. I was with Officer [ redacted ] on the station road._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _And you followed him to —_

_WITNESS #1  
_ _A back alleyway. We knew he was armed and highly dangerous and it was just the two of us so we hung back. But we heard voices —_

_PROSECUTION  
_ _Whose was the other?_

_WITNESS #1  
_ _Peter Pettigrew’s. They were arguing — I don’t recall much of it. Just nonsense about a secret keeper._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _Let the record show Officer [ redacted ]’s memory has been combed via Pensieve and this testimony is accurate. What happened next?_

_WITNESS #1  
_ _I heard the words of the Killing Curse and then a great bang. The force of it must have been — it blew the alleyway apart down to the sewer. When the dust cleared he looked shocked by what he’d done. We took advantage and rushed forward with silver manacles._

So help him Sirius felt a twinge of sympathy thinking of the occasion the Potters, not having known about Remus’s “allergy” as they later called it, had served Christmas Eve dinner on fine bone china with ancient and highly polished silver utensils. Remus had picked up his fork and knife and grimaced but couldn’t very well drop them; the Potters had invited their neighbors, nobody knew, nobody could know. James’s eyes were big as saucers and he looked from Remus’s tight lips and furrowed brow to his parents to the neighbors and back as ever to Sirius with a caught-in-headlights expression delineating his complete helplessness in the face of such a dilemma. Across the table Sirius watched Remus eat gingerly and not much at all and as such he could hardly eat either though the food was delicious. That night he and James had had to help Remus clean and treat and bandage the wounds which were deep and bloody red almost like the skin had been burned away.

_PROSECUTION  
_ _What did you find then?_

_WITNESS #1  
_ _The finger, Pettigrew’s finger with the big signet ring… four Muggle corpses having fallen into the crevice. Junkies likely but — still._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _Then what did you do?_

_WITNESS #1  
_ _Sent a Patronus for the transport van. Took Lupin to the precinct… the rest is history, I suppose._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _Thank you. No further questions._

_QUESTIONING OF DEFENDANT WITH REGARD TO WITNESS TESTIMONY  
_ _[ redacted ]_

_The prosecution calls witness #2, Fenrir Greyback, to the stand. Veritaserum is administered by Bailiff [ redacted ]._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _What is your relationship to the defendant?_

_WITNESS #2  
_ _Complicated [ laughter ]… I have been his master since he was a child — his lover since 1978._

_DEFENDANT  
_ _[ redacted ]_

_JUDGE [ REDACTED ] CALLS THE COURTROOM TO ORDER_

_PROSECUTION  
_ _What happened in 1978?_

_WITNESS #2  
_ _Remus came to me and my pack in Guern in Brittany to defect. He said he had been working for Dumbledore but he felt his calling and he understood — the time had come for blood and for vengeance. He realized what I had done for him was the greatest gift that can be bestowed from one upon another. He shared with me information that I passed along to Bellatrix Lestrange and others of the Dark Lord’s contingent including the location of a storage facility on the Scottish coast. We agreed he was much more use to us on the inside. So we sent him back to London._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _With a brutal mauling._

_WITNESS #2  
_ _They had to believe he was still one of them and that he feared and hated me or else he would have been too clear a target for suspicion._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _How did he pass information along to you?_

_WITNESS #2  
_ _Some werewolves can share dreams with their masters. With some rehearsal this practice can be controlled._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _Thank you. No further questions._

_QUESTIONING OF DEFENDANT WITH REGARD TO WITNESS TESTIMONY_

_PROSECUTION  
_ _Have you ever had a sexual relationship with Mr. Greyback?_

_DEFENDANT  
_ _Yes._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _Was it fully consensual?_

_DEFENDANT  
_ _Yes._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _Have you ever shared sensitive information with Mr. Greyback?_

_DEFENDANT  
_ _Yes._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _Have you ever shared dreams with Mr. Greyback?_

_DEFENDANT  
_ _Yes._

_PROSECUTION  
_ _No further questions._

_DEFENDANT  
_ _But —_

_JUDGE [ REDACTED ] CALLS COURTROOM TO ORDER_

_CLOSING REMARKS FROM THE DEFENSE  
_ _[ redacted ]_

_CLOSING REMARKS FROM THE PROSECUTION  
_ _[ redacted ]_

\--

Sirius looked at it for a long time — the very small and beautiful and terrible word, _but —_ and the redacted statement after Greyback’s first answer. He reached for the tumbler of scotch and the glass shattered but the liquid stayed floating in a strange squat cylinder. He cleaned it up with just the force of his mind feeling rather like a villain from _Star Wars_. Desperately he was in need of the magic calming potion and he longed for James’s invisibility cloak for the nth time just so he could sneak into Sanderson’s stores for mothwings, and for the nth time he wondered what had happened to it. 

The important thing to be gleaned from this transcript was that Sprout had been right. Remus had been a normal boy at school, and then there had been some event, and everything had changed. It was clear that everything stemmed from December 1978 and that he never would know a thing at all to be true unless he could find out what had happened. When Remus came back — it was February before he was allowed out of St. Mungo’s — he never spoke of it. Something about him had turned rather brittle then. Sirius had thought it was from being hurt so badly in service to the cause. Now he understood it was where things had gone belly-up wrong. _Guern, in Brittany_. Perhaps he could go there over Christmas holidays though it was likely there was nothing there anymore. It was likely the only people who knew the actuality of what had happened were Remus and Greyback. _And now he is beyond speaking on the subject_. 

He made notes to bring in the morning to Pomona. Then he put the transcript in the fire where it belonged. 

\--

A few days later Sirius and Pomona arrived in the boardroom fifteen minutes early for a final strategy meeting. “I’ll speak about Lupin,” she said; “everyone knows you were friends at school.” Sirius was to review a case Pomona had unearthed from 1799 wherein a popular and gregarious vampire student (interestingly, Sprout had noted, a Hufflepuff) had graduated and gone on to become infamous for indiscriminate bloodsucking and terror throughout Wales. It had caused absolutely no change to admittance policy; indeed, two years after the vampire had been extradited to Transylvania for (failed) rehabilitation, Hogwarts admitted a pair of Veela twins. 

They waited while the rest of the staff and board gathered reviewing their notes and drinking strong tea. Pomona had almost definitely gotten a little high before her arrival to steady her nerves and Sirius wished for a moment he had taken a hint from her. Perhaps marijuana could serve as a stand-in for the magic calming potion, he wondered, trying to review the magical properties of cannabis he had once memorized for his seventh year project. His foot was bouncing under the table completely unbidden. He thought about this girl, Amelia, waiting in her new room in Bristol for good news, sipping goat’s blood through a straw, watching telly with no idea she had awakened a debate so beastly. 

At precisely 10:30 as before Dumbledore called the room to order. Again, Mr. Smith presented first, joined by Sanderson and another board member Sirius didn’t recognize. With a complicated and, Sirius admitted begrudgingly, rather impressive bit of spellwork they had put together a three-dimensional model of the proposed school on the Coll land grant. “Designed by the premiere magical architecture firm Merriman and Dragontongue,” said Smith, “the Hebridean Part-Human Magic Academy will be constructed with maximal regard for the safety and comfort of a diverse student body. It includes appropriate facilities and allowances for werewolves, vampires, kelpies, Veela, centaurs, ghosts, merpeople, and other part-human students. It includes a state-of-the-art potions suite, hospital wing, and fully stocked library, a bloodbank, supervised transformation cells, water-accessible classrooms, and other amenities.” As he listed each element he magnified it within the three-dimensional magical model. It was without a doubt an impressive prospect.

“For those concerned that a separate magic school may promote inequality and insularity,” said Mr. Smith with a pointed look at Sirius and Pomona, “many classrooms are equipped with two-way mirrors that will connect them to their Hogwarts equivalents.” 

“A thoughtful touch,” said Dumbledore. He started a smattering of polite applause in which Smith and his cohort smiled smugly and regained their seats. “Professors Black and Sprout, if you will — ”

They had no such fancy spellwork to prove their points but Pomona passed around rolls of parchment for each attendee containing a few vital notes. “The crux of our argument is twofold,” she said brightly. “One, to argue there is in fact historical precedent, having existed since the opening of the school in the 1500s, for unquestioning admittance of all part-human students. And two, to argue that there is little to no proof, at least in the more recent cases, that part-human students who do become radicalized are a danger to others at Hogwarts. Sirius will begin with point number one.” 

He related the story of the Veela twins and a few others Pomona had uncovered, and then Pomona reviewed the tidbits from Remus’s trial transcript indicating he’d turned coat after graduation, and a few similar stories from previous part-human students who had gone Dark. Sirius grimly noted interest waning among select of the faculty and board as Pomona went over a fifth anecdote from the early 1900s. “The moral of our story is,” she said finally, “it can be deeply beneficial to part-human students to host them at Hogwarts away from their masters and/or their families, to normalize them in a human setting.” At the upturned bored faces she smiled beatifically. “Thank you for your consideration.” 

She and Sirius sat and under the table she squeezed his hand. 

“Comments?” Dumbledore asked. “Remarks?” 

“Lupin was writing about lycanthropic dream sharing in 1977,” said Smith coldly. “Certainly you’ve read his seventh year project.” 

“What does that have to do with anything,” Sprout said indignantly. 

“He testified under Veritaserum that he had shared dreams with Greyback.”

“That he wrote about it as a potentiality or a theme in folklore and legend doesn’t indicate that he was doing it at Hogwarts,” Sirius said. Voice down, he was thinking; hands folded. More than once the too-much-magic feeling had gotten the better of him like this. It was better than having too little but it was only just. Too little felt like he couldn’t catch his breath — too much he felt dizzy and light, as though he’d hyperventilated. 

“It’s worth consideration,” said Smith, turning back to his leather folder. “My work has shown me there is rarely such a thing as coincidence.” 

A vote was called. Again Dumbledore abstained, and Smith’s measure for the Coll magic school passed by one vote. After a brief flurry of clammy hand-shaking Smith departed to Apparate to the Hebridean Wizarding Counsel to see about the land grant, Dumbledore to his office to write Amelia’s rejection letter, Sprout to her greenhouses likely to finish her joint from that morning, and Sirius to Sanderson’s potion stores, concealed by an _Obfuscate_ so powerful he could feel the static in his skin and didn’t show up in mirrors, where he filled a leather bag with butter-pale, soft mothwings, shaking such with anger and the wild feral magic that he dropped a precious few upon the worn flagstones. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> nb / trigger warning: the "consent issues" tag refers to parts of this chapter in particular. nothing is overly graphic, but take care of yourself -- if you don't want to read this particular element, you can stop reading at "for queen and country" and start again at "the day of the full moon."

** Azkaban  
** _ May 1993 _

In the first days of the short bitter springtime he felt Dumbledore’s phoenix ghost chase away the seething ecstasy of sadness, he drank the first of the fifth course hardly tasting it, and he watched blindedly as Dumbledore went away with the bird and the things came back pressing and reaching through the door. They had learned they could fish up his memory of the third trial’s fear and the fourth trial’s pain and they had been enjoying it for days like a feast of funeral leftovers. On the rare occasions they left the door to his cell he calmed himself by pressing his face into the window toward the sea and trying to understand soon they would eat up the memories entire and it would disappear for good. 

\--

On the late afternoon of the full moon he blinked blearily clearing the sand and the sticky horror from his eyes when Dumbledore and the Ministry crew and their bevy of gamboling Patronuses arrived at his cell door, banishing the gathered Dementors, with the final potion of the fifth trial. He sat and drank and when he set the goblet back down he saw his hands were shaking, in extension of his arms shaking, in extension of his whole chest shaking. Sleeplessness and fear. Like an endless hangover eating him wringing him raw. “Alright, Remus?” Dumbledore asked from the door. 

“They love what you’ve been doing to me,” Remus said. His voice was thick. “They eat it up. It’s ambrosia to them.” 

“It’s no less than what you deserve,” Dumbledore said with a cold smile. “This one is well-balanced. Severus has assured me.” 

“I’m certain he did.” 

“He managed to flavor it a bit with mint. Did you taste it?” 

Remus had, but he didn’t answer. 

“It turns out this particular variety — a special breed, out of Assam. A soporific quality; very calming. It combats anxiety and stress. A tea brewed from its leaves is offered at most restaurants as well as most business meetings in that part of wizarding India.” 

“Interesting,” said Remus dryly, staring at the wall. 

“I just thought you might be intrigued to know exactly what changes have been made from test to test,” said Dumbledore. “Don’t mind me trying to inform you about what you’re going through.” 

Remus watched the wall and collected his fear-scattered consciousness by increments. He remembered unfocusedly the days when he’d had patience that felt endless. But it was not so much patience as it was a sort of constant motivation to accept the things he could in order to put them behind him, and shove the rest somewhere in his head he kept locked. In here there was nowhere in one’s mind that could be kept locked. 

For the nth time he wondered how many had died. That was something they had taken great pleasure in letting him mull over for hours or perhaps days. 

He stood — he didn’t remember the last time he had — and his knees cracked, he was woozy on his feet. He also did not remember the last time he had eaten. His stomach wrung itself in search of last drops. He had to lean against the wall to take his clothes off, which was no longer strange, because they no longer eyed him with such clinical curiosity. They had seen what they needed to see in order to draw what conclusions were necessary and now he supposed his body was like a cadaver for morticians in training. A not-thing, nearly stone and sexless. Perishable and dissolving. 

He folded his clothes and sat in the corner with his knees up waiting. He watched the whiteness in the cloud cover turn to brilliant gradient toward the endless plane of the sea. What would they do with him when it worked, he wondered, not for the first time. He could feel already that this time there would be no pain like there had been before. But perhaps again there would be the terrible visions. He pressed his forehead against his knees. It was coming — sometimes it felt like tea leaves in boiling water, or like a photograph in darkroom chemicals. Slowly it took, it imprinted and it changed. The soft touch in this liminal moment he could still imagine. No matter what was ever taken from him still through some primordial spiritus mundi he could summon it — 

It picked him up and spun him through the same wringer as usual. After last time it felt rather like ripping off a bandaid. Before he opened his eyes he was certain it worked. It felt like the one thing he had ever admitted to himself that he truly envied — how Sirius and James and the rat could just wear an animal body like it was some sort of interesting hat. It was himself — no more or less himself than he had ever been. Like the himself he knew lived in this place who had been blunted like a practice sword — like the himself from Guern and the months after, who had buried everything, who had tried to forget and erase all of it, who had shoved it down into the tiny room in his mind behind the locked door. When he opened his eyes he looked around the room in the monochromatic gradient and saw no bodies. So this was it — this was right, this was real — this was what it was like to be right, to be real — this was almost what it had been like in the time before. 

At last he looked up at them in the door; they were silent. They watched him; their quills were poised over their notepads. He could hear the unreal humming of their tiny ectoplasmic protectors. “Remus?” said Dumbledore. 

He cocked his head. He tried to say yes but it came out like a sort of huff sound. 

“That’s you, Remus?” 

He nodded his head. He could feel how the face was different and the bones. And everything he could smell — the deathness of that room, the deathness he had been living in for twelve years. Himself: bitter, animal, hunger, old sweat, blood. Weeping, the salty skin-smell of weeping. And in the door, parchment, ink, lavender, fear. Fear like black oil… he recalled once years ago he had seen from his window a Muggle drilling vessel on the horizon heading toward the fields in the North Sea. This was that fear. Fear of something lying beneath being snatched away. Like a carpet, or entitlement. 

Then the door opened, really truly it opened, for the first time in twelve years, and through it instead of the beringed horrible Greyback from the hallucination walked Albus Dumbledore. 

With his instincts half that of a wolf and half that of a human who hadn’t been touched by another human in over a decade it took every bit of strength and presence of mind Remus could muster to keep from bowing his head out of deference. Dumbledore was tall — he smelled like sage, and he had no fear. He put his hand out to Remus and it smelled like metal, like magic — like his wand. Like owls… like parchment and like the ghost of the potion he had brought with him. “Albus,” said someone from the door, “are you fucking mad?” 

“He’s completely harmless,” said Dumbledore, and Remus could feel his voice echoing in the tiny room. I am not, he would have said, if he could speak. Were you not at my trial — did you not hear what they said?

He could hear Dumbledore’s heartbeat — powerful strides. He was proud. His hand was fragile bones, skin, veiny bits (as his throat was) and yet when he rested it on Remus’s head it felt very heavy. The brittle patronizing smile he gave Remus was frightening, charged with an inhuman and feral ambitious potential, but when he scratched behind the ears it felt good. The long fingers dug into the itchy thick ruff at the base of his neck. The door was ajar and through the crack he could see the rest of the Ministry men had arranged their Patronuses as a sort of barrier. They startled when Remus eyed them. 

“Albus,” said one, “come on. We’ll need to owl Smith.” 

When Dumbledore turned his back a funny and scary and almost familiar thing in the back of Remus’s brain said, now’s a good time, for lunging. Instead the door clanged shut with a sound that vibrated through his whole skull. One by one they left — he watched their blue light fade in the hallway. 

Who was Smith? A name as plain as that, especially for a wizard, sounded like a false one. If he was invested in goings-on with Remus and the trials why wasn’t he here with the rest of them? 

He walked in a circle. By the window all the death and screaming didn’t smell so bad. The sea, and the birds, low tide, shit, dead things. Brilliant vibrancy. He stuck his nose out the window and he breathed and he waited. He tried to think of his last question for Dumbledore. Perhaps he should ask how many others had died before him in the trials? Or what else was in development — or what this potion was really for. Wizards did not do things to help werewolves. There had to be some ulterior motive, but perhaps it was just to give the Dementors something more to eat. 

After a while he heard a sound behind him in the door and thinking it was Dumbledore and the rest of them again he got to his feet and turned. Rather it was a Dementor. He shrank back instinctively before he realized he didn’t feel it — its ravenousness and its investigative stirring — and it didn't reach for him. Then it moved on again. 

Interesting. 

For the next hour he sat by the window and watched at the door. He had not since his admittance been able to study them so closely without feeling their draining — their spiraling suction. They walked by dragging the heavy tendrils of themselves like blood-wet crepe paper toward all the other fear and despair in that place but they did not stop for his. Because they could not feel him, he realized. Like this he had not enough for them to eat. So it was as if he did not exist. 

At last another one of them stopped at the door. They looked inside and he could feel them sniffing. Like some oversize malignant niffler after his soul instead of gold. He pressed himself closer and closer to the window and he could have sworn the strangely chambered animal heart skipped a beat or two when he heard the creature twisting the lock. When he edged closer to the door it smelled him and startled — yet still it hesitated, confused, before it moved away. 

It had been years since he had entertained this possibility as anything other than a fever dream he could only summon when the wind blew the right way. But he thought, at last, even in this quieter and blunter mind, yes, perhaps this could be.

\--

On the first of December 1978 Remus took the fast train from London to Calais carrying nothing more than his necessities in his backpack and nothing to connect him to the Ministry, the Auror Office, the Order, or any of its members. There were other witches and wizards on the train — Remus could feel the twinge of extension charms around their purses and satchels, the wiggling nudge of their fear, and he understood they were fleeing the United Kingdom. He sat in a window seat and attempted to read the only book he had brought with him, which was Evelyn Waugh’s _Decline and Fall_ , but eventually he found himself staring at the same page and reading none of it. 

In Calais the other witches and wizards were awaited by relations or by private cabs. Remus waited a few hours for the night train to the beach town of St-Malo. Then he hitchhiked ever inland to a commune called Guern where there dwelled the werewolf pack which he had become eligible to join on the dusk moor in Somerset in 1965. He intended to pass off his discovery of the pack as dream scrying a la the werewolf heroes of his research; in fact, Dumbledore had suggested the location after having allegedly received “intelligence” from an unknown source. 

The final driver, who picked him up on the edge of the town of Loudeac walking down the highway hunched over against the bitter wind, was a tall and rangy Englishwoman in her forties who put a chill up Remus’s back so much as looking at him. His heart was pounding and he had long since chewed his nails halfway down the bed. They were stopped at a traffic light and she turned to him and her nostrils flared. “Are you looking for someone,” she said delicately. 

“I am.” 

He took off his wool scarf and inclined his neck just so recalling Indra in Inverness twelve months and seven lifetimes previous. He could feel his heart beating in his fingers. 

“Yes,” she said, “I thought so.” 

He cleared his mind and steadied his hands. _Occlumens_ , he thought. 

“What’s your name?” 

“Remus Lupin.” 

She was smiling. It caught the wedged white eye of the sun in the slipping clouds. “Yes,” she said, “of course you are.” She reached across the center console and wrapped her hand around his knee. There was a thick rime of blood in the beds of her nails. “He has been waiting for you.” 

“Has he.” 

“Yes. Yes, yes.” Her hand tightened — almost a caress, almost motherly. “It will bring him so much joy that you’ve come home.” 

His ears were ringing. The woman put the radio on and tuned to a station that played a Christian service and she sang along with the French hymns. 

On the outskirts of Guern the pack had seized a farm through intimidation of its Muggle owners and they lived there, thirty strong, in the stables and the barns and in every room in the house, which was musty and its windows boarded and which smelled like blood, and soil and dust. Outside the vast spreading fields had gone cold and fallow and were blanketed over as if in down by pristine white snow marked only by the winding hieroglyphic footprints of wolves. The attic suite was reserved for Greyback’s purposes and while the Englishwoman, whose name was Leigh, went up to fetch him Remus waited with his backpack on the front stoop pressing his face into his scarf against the cold. Now that it was real his heart had slowed and his hands had stopped shaking. It simply was. It was and he had trained for this and he knew what must be done. “This is about more than just our way of life,” Dumbledore had told him. “This is about survival.” 

Inside the house he heard feet on the stairs. For just a second he closed his eyes. Then the screen door opened. Finality in a single sound. Remus turned. 

Greyback was — he was. He was a good ten centimeters shorter than Remus and he was balding. His clothes were fine but they were stained with blood and worse and the buttons were stretching at his big belly and he wore on every finger tarnished rings some of them bearing signets and others missing jewels. His eyes were bright but they were piggish and cruel and they looked down Remus to his feet and then back up. Behind him in the door Leigh’s eyes moved between the two of them. She was biting her smile closed as though she witnessed some altogether more sacred reunion. 

It was as if it was tugged to the front of his mind and the child, the child that was himself was running and running and then he fell — 

“Remus Lupin,” said Greyback. 

“Hello.” 

“Seen the light, eh?” 

Remus scuffed his boots. In the West a storm was coming. 

“You’d best come inside,” said Leigh. 

They had coffee the three of them at the kitchen table and during the course of it a few men and women came in the door to warm their hands at the gas stove until Greyback fixed them with a look and they went out again. The coffee was stale and bitter and they had no cream nor sugar and so drinking it was like downing some bad potion but Remus held the mug tightly in both hands to refrain from any sort of nervous gesture. 

“What brings you here,” said Greyback. 

“I worked for Dumbledore and them,” Remus said, “after I finished school.” He had practiced this on the train to Calais and on the buses afterward and in the cars that had picked him up hitchhiking. The simpler he could make it the better, he had decided; it would be easier to keep the lie up. “I want to defect. I don’t trust him. I don’t believe what he says he wants for us and anyway I don’t want it.” 

“What does he want for us?” Leigh asked. 

“To be like wizards. To have regular jobs and homes and families. To keep locked up in a basement on the full moon.” 

Greyback snarled at this. “That is not your calling.” 

“I can — I know. I can feel it.” 

They studied him. He wondered how many werewolves they had made of children between them. Leigh had an eerie sharpness about her teeth such that he wondered if she had filed them to points, and her eyes, like Greyback’s, were possessed with something almost parasitic. 

“I want to defect,” Remus said again. 

“I heard that,” said Greyback. “We’ve had several defections already. I am happy to accept yours and all I ask is that you prove you are sincere.” 

He wanted information. Of course he wanted information. He wondered why Dumbledore and the Order amidst all their well-intentioned and already rapidly squandered “training” had not prepared him for this. As quickly as he could he wracked his mind for something he could say that was of the littlest consequence. “There’s a weapons arsenal,” he said finally. “On the Scottish coast not far from Oban. I haven’t been there but I know there’s all sorts of magical weaponry there, in storage and development.” 

In fact it was one of several such arsenals, it was rarely staffed, and it was more for storage than development. There were others that were more consequential that Remus quickly Occluded in his mind. He had never been told the exact locations of most of the rest of them, anyway. 

Greyback and Leigh whispered to one another. “That’s good,” Greyback said finally, “that’s very good.” He smiled showing a mouthful of sharp and crooked and cracked yellow teeth like a churchyard of very old and broken gravestones. “What about Dumbledore?” 

“Back and forth between London and Hogwarts. Every meeting they let me come to was at Hogwarts.” 

“You don’t know about any other kind of meeting spot?” 

“They didn’t exactly disclose the most sensitive information to me.” 

“Of course not,” said Greyback. He studied Remus with a chilling expression straddling the border between amusement, condescension, and lecherousness. “You do not belong to them.” 

“I don’t,” Remus lied.

“You belong to me,” Greyback said, standing; he clapped Remus by the shoulder, and the smile that spread across his face was chilling and repugnant. Remus’s stomach froze. Greyback clasped him by the back of the neck and his thumb was up against the old scar. He remembered Indra: _this one is just to hold us down_. “You belong to me,” Greyback said again. His voice was tight and close against Remus's ear. 

\--

He quickly realized how little he truly understood evil. He had fought what dregs of the war had begun in England and even that was of a different breed than this. There should have been a class at Hogwarts called _Evils Human and Inhuman_. Not even a class in meeting them or fighting them but a class on knowing what they were and knowing how deep they ran and knowing when they started and knowing why. In the third floor garret room — bare walls sloping out of a concaving ceiling — that had been consigned to him Remus lay awake and looked at the crescent moon and the snow in the window and after an hour or so he heard the footsteps at the door. The visitor — nightmare creature in a man. Possessor and possessed. The draught through the window smelled like a coming storm. 

Whispering in the hallway and then silence. Then as though by a ghost the doorknob turning. 

For queen and country, Remus thought. Lie back and think of England. Something curled in his belly and curdled and calcified — perhaps this was what Dumbledore had meant when he had said, “Information by any means necessary.”

The smell of him — like a dog having rolled in carrion. The sky in the wedge of window was deep velvet violet with the storm. Greyback sat heavily on the edge of the bed. His rings made sounds against each other abstract and semi-musical. Then he pressed a thumb against-inside Remus’s lower lip. The rough pad of it slid against each row of teeth and pressed up tightly against each canine to discern how sharp the point. At last it slid past Remus’s teeth entire and pressed down hard against his tongue. The large rough hand wrapped his cheek and jaw as far around as his ear. 

Perhaps there was a choice to be made here, but not really. Remus closed his mouth with just enough pressure in his teeth to hurt. He met Greyback’s eyes when he swallowed — hollowed his cheeks and tongue and sucked. 

_Relinquo servitutem_ , he thought desperately. 

This — the bright-eyed feral animal bloody about the mouth who dragged his broken child body into the copse of woods. 

\--

It was not like this in any of the legends or the stories. It felt like he was always naked and against his skin he felt the fine weave of the clothing Greyback looted or accepted as bribes from the wealthy wizards of Brittany. The house was cold and yet Remus woke every morning in the attic room sweating in the heavy thrall of the overwarm body with its tumescent morning wood pressed against his ass and its strange palm-paw splayed possessively over his belly and its huffed animal snores against the back of his neck and invariably he thought, I could do it now. I could kill him now. But of course he did not, because he knew there was more that must be gleaned. Like cracked seeds from a dead field. 

The rest of them were feral, rangy — tall and strange. They looked at him askance and cornered him on the stairs and some would snap their teeth and others would inhale noisily at his throat. They had heard his name before. Sometimes he thought he heard them outside the door at night. 

Owls came in the afternoons to the third floor garret and Remus watched them while he walked in the dead white fields. Now he thought of this as a kind of presagement of Azkaban — most of what he could remember was bad, and it played on a staticky neverending loop, like an overloved record. The birds were dark and small against the pale sky and the frozen fields, and they would wait at the window of Greyback's bedroom, they would be tugged inside; fifteen minutes later they would be pushed out again by the large beringed hand bearing a scroll of return parchment. Remus watched them. He remembered the face of the wolf in 1965 so black with blood in the pitchy nightness that it seemed to swallow light. The reflection and refraction of the last full moon he saw with human eyes. He understood in their flat in Chalk Farm Sirius awaited him in their bed and it was likely he was hardly sleeping and doing too much coke and biting his nails until they bled. He could not for the life of him recall the totality with which he had once known Sirius loved him. Only the strange hollow un-thing, the raging humiliation and the simmering guilt. Fever fever fever. He thought he already felt sick things crawling inside him. He had made his bed; in it was the man-thing who had apparently not yet exhausted his capability to turn Remus into a monster. 

Every night he climbed the stairs to bed knowing what awaited him with equal parts torment and a broken, frightening longing. “Owls today,” he whispered, very late. 

He felt through his bones like some primal directive the rumble when Greyback spoke. “Almost ready,” he said. “It's almost time.” 

Remus knew already what this meant — it was almost time to cross the channel to Dover. But it had been almost time to cross the channel since his arrival. 

“We will be welcomed as kings in his court and he will give us full sovereignty to do as is our right.” With one clawlike fingernail he traced the circumference of his old bite stretched with years across Remus's ribs. He was fond of touching them. It felt like a hot needle — like a tattoo or like a brand. I deserve this, Remus realized distantly. “Our numbers have been decimated,” said Greyback. “Wizardkind has denied us our true nature for too long. I mourn how they pinioned you, Remus…” He pressed his index finger roughly past Remus's lips and felt again the sharpness of his canine teeth. “You've never tasted blood…”

“I want to,” he said, closing his eyes. Greyback's huge hand wrapped the old scar on his throat with a tentative pressure. “God, I want to, I want to.” 

The trick was to let the animal thing seize his mouth and his whole body. It desired and hungered and it was wild and feral and too long caged and yet it understood when to submit. Sometimes he wondered how he would get himself back from it. Other times he thought he would likely die before he could. 

“Just a little longer now,” Greyback said. “We have a spy in London among all your old friends.” Remus bit inside his lip to keep hard enough to taste blood; he had feared there was somebody. He realized then perhaps he had been sold out already but quickly he tamped the terror down — if he had been Greyback would already have killed him in his sleep. “He reports to that feral bitch on his every move,” Greyback said. _That feral bitch_ , the moniker moderately affectionate, was how he referred to Bellatrix Lestrange. “Blackbirds of a feather, they are.” 

Remus could feel the smile against the back of his neck. Black birds. 

\--

The day of the full moon he and the wolf were restless and he paced in the snowy fields and watched at the owls who came to Greyback’s window with a cold and unfocused envy. The pack seemed to consider this a kind of official induction and he hoped after it he would be privy to more information and at the same time he feared what it entailed to run with his master. He understood Greyback expected him to turn people and wondered when he would start expecting it. Guern was quiet and not much populated and the citizens knew something was happening and they locked their windows and doors at night and stayed away from the farm and the woods. 

At dusk they walked together through the fields toward the sharp black edge of trees. Greyback led them and Leigh walked close beside Remus. The pack was stronger than he had thought from the glimpses of the others in the house — perhaps there were forty or fifty. Greyback was the oldest, then Leigh. Behind Remus were three children who could not have been older than twelve, dressed in layered rags and tearing knit caps, faces dirty, speaking to each other rapidly in a sharp and brittle language Remus had never heard before. Later he learned it was Basque. Most of them were in their twenties or thirties. Aside from Greyback and Leigh the other elders walked delicately with their backs hunched as if to their deaths. 

They came to a place in the woods where the wind was still and Remus felt, bleeding up through his feet, the ancient wellspring of magical resonance. The center of it was marked with a tall cairn. Those who cared for their clothes — Greyback among them — undressed, showing leathery goosebumped scarred skin in rainbow variant of color, tattoos — some of which moved, bites and wounds, freckles and birthmarks, spreading plum stains. Through the trees the moonglow blurring the horizon made Remus shiver. Inside him that thing was circling and he could feel its nervous defensive growling low in his own throat; he bit his lips tightly to keep it in. It was very easy to let it up to the surface of himself to assume his fear after all he had made it live so close now for almost a month, but when he did he felt its startledness and its desperate flight response. The animal way it had of telling him, this is very bad, which he later supposed it had been telling him since his arrival in Guern. At the last he looked up at Greyback across the clearing and the smile that spread across his face was sick and slow. 

He knows, Remus thought, they all know; I won’t wake up. Then it seized him. 

\--

The dawn burst, like fruit or a candy, against the sea, and for the first time in in his life Remus felt the change the other way. It hurt about the same — the opposite things shrinking and the opposite things extending, and his skin turned the other way, and his spine straightened out, as though it were pulled taut. When it had finished he looked down at himself and made sure his knees were right. He was halfway through getting dressed when Dumbledore brought his breakfast porridge to the door. “Alright, Remus?” he asked. 

“Yes.” More than alright, he thought. “It worked.” 

“Yes,” said Albus. “There will be some continued refinement. Banana slug extract, of which there has been a non-negligible amount in the courses you have taken to date, is very expensive as it must be appropriately preserved and shipped all the way from the American Northwest. So we are looking for more affordable alternatives. The accessibility of this potion is of key importance to Severus and me. As such I am afraid there will be more trials.” 

He tried to make his face look startled or upset by that. “Can I have more questions?”

Dumbledore, for his part, tried to make his face look sympathetic. “Of course not. I do believe you have one left, though, if you’d like to ask it.” 

He had one more question and Dumbledore had one more veto. I am going to leave this place, he thought, I am going to kill my master, I am going to kill the rat. “I’ll save it, then,” Remus told him, “for next time.” 

The ghost light reflected in the blue eyes in the door and Remus thought he saw something there he couldn’t name. “Very well.” Then he left. The light faded in the hall, like sunlight or a hinkypunk. 

\--

He slept. Again the dream was not a dream. He walked with Malfoy against the high stone wall of the salt city, and he held under his arm the envelope containing the horrible photographs. “We are very close,” Malfoy was saying, “achingly close in fact. It’s like the opening of a chess game. Make way for the king…” 

“Where does it all stand?” said Greyback, said Remus. 

“This — ” Lucius indicated the envelope — “will set the stage, as it were, with regard to situating you and I where we cannot be ignored. The other pieces are in place. The rat’s at Hogwarts with the Boy who Lived and the blood traitor Black. Not that I fully trust him to keep an eye. But I do trust him to keep himself alive which he indeed is very good at and which may prove a boon.” 

“Who else stayed out of Azkaban?” 

“Not many — Nott, Macnair, Yaxley, the Carrows… Taking their places as we speak.” Lucius turned toward Greyback; Remus could see by his posture he meant to Apparate. “Are you certain you won’t take the mark? It would make it rather easier to communicate.” 

“We don’t belong to him,” Greyback said, “we’re hired claws, if you will. Fellow stakeholders in an outcome.” 

“Well then,” said Lucius. His smile was wan and drawn. “Keep an eye for the owls.” 

He twisted and was gone. Remus woke; the afternoon sun stretching through the clouds spangled like dropped silver upon the sea. Hogwarts. He whispered it to himself as though it would be real and remembered only if spoken aloud. _He’s at Hogwarts_. 


	8. Chapter 8

** Hogwarts  
** _ September 1991 _

Sirius had not seen his godson since early October of 1981 at what he later realized had been a cleverly constructed neutral location. He had not known James and Lily had moved to Godric’s Hollow — only Remus had — and Sirius had been clueless enough to assume they were too busy with the baby and understood the stress he was under at work to invite him over for anything but toward the end of September James owled him and said they were going to Margate to walk on the old piers because they had not yet taken Harry there and would he and Remus like to come? So they met; they walked and they didn’t speak much. Lily’s lips were very tight and even Harry who had just turned one seemed kind of nervous. It was so quiet and empty there that when they walked behind James and Lily and Harry Remus had ever so briefly dared to hold Sirius’s hand. His was clammy and small and cold; he had lost a lot of weight, toward the end, he said it was from stress. In the late afternoon they built a sandcastle together on the beach. Remus went up to a grocery store on the corner to get things for a picnic (or so he said, Sirius had thought later when he had begun to call into question every time he had ever let Remus off by himself since their Hogwarts graduation). James and Sirius built frantically and Harry knocked through it with his grubby hands laughing and laughing and Lily sat and stared intermittently at Sirius and the sea. He understood concretely for the first time that she distrusted him. 

Anyway the issue at hand was that Sirius had not seen his godson since October of 1981 and now nearly ten years later he was at Hogwarts taking altogether too much time with the sorting hat. Sirius had covered his mouth with his hand; he was aware he was staring. Minerva McGonagall rested a staying hand between his shoulderblades. He’d sat through fifteen of these ceremonies by now (half his life, he realized with a thrill of something, like nostalgia or disappointment) and in the past — since his own, twenty fucking years previous — he’d found them intolerably boring. Of his own sorting he only remembered the weight of the hat on his head and the smell of it and the way it spoke, and how the speaking was only an echo inside his own head, like thoughts he wasn’t really having, and how it said, _A Black, really? Huh…_ and how it had shouted GRYFFINDOR almost even before it touched James’s head (he had met James on the train), and the vivid bright red head of a tall girl who had put her robes on over a rainbow-striped long-sleeve t-shirt of Muggle persuasion. He had been sitting at the Gryffindor table alone while all his young relatives stared at him from the Slytherin table across the room and all the existing Gryffindors stared at him too and everything he was realizing (chiefly, it will be very very odd to go home again after this) turned inside him to concrete and sank. Shortly thereafter he was joined by the redheaded girl, then by a curly-headed and smiling Jewish boy with uncannily pale eyes (this was Benji Fenwick), and then by Remus, who was very nervous and thin, as though he feared any minute he would wander into a trap or something; Sirius had spotted him on the train trying to make himself very small, which was difficult, because he was so gangly that he looked as though he’d been stretched on a rack. His hands were raw and red with scars and Sirius just thought he had bad eczema or had somehow touched myrtlap essence. Can I sit here, he said. His voice was less small as was the sort of brilliant curious appeal of his yellow-green eyes. Sirius said, sure. They sent MacDonald and Meadowes and McKinnon, then James, then the Prewitts. It had felt like assembling the squad from a superhero movie which he later supposed indeed it was. 

The hat on Harry’s head yelled GRYFFINDOR! Sirius let his breath out quietly in a string of relieved curses and appeals to assorted quasi-spiritual entities. 

\--

He was plotting ways to creatively and secretively run into Harry in the hallway in a way that wasn’t creepy. He was sure almost every teacher in this school had offered Harry special help on account of Histories nevermind Sirius had a quasi-legal directive to provide special help to this child which had been denied him for ten years. He was also sure Dumbledore would take certain precautions to limit his and Harry’s interaction being as Dumbledore had already told him, you must let Harry figure all this out for himself. Which seemed rather unfair to say the least. Sirius was not about to out and tell the kid, I’m your godfather and everything terrible that has ever happened to you is in part because I was too sex-blinded to suspect my partner was a traitor who basically killed your parents. Maybe the best approach was something along the lines of, I was your father’s friend at school. I miss him, and I’m happy to help you in his honor, or something equally sappy. Leaving out things like, I taught James how to roll a joint and explained to him where the clitoris is located. Humiliatingly he was the first person I kissed and we used to Apparate completely unlicensed to Edinburgh just to get quality Indian food. Your father could turn into a stag whenever he wanted by the time he was fifteen and as such he was unnecessarily fond of saying things like “Check out my rack.” He was a big stoner and a genius and overfond of bad gin. 

It was difficult to plot all this when he was also plotting his classes and putting the finishing touches on a book this time completely his own about assorted magically resonant holy wells around the United Kingdom, about which he was being pestered by biweekly owls from his agent on Diagon Alley. Besides all summer had been a bad spell, his longest yet, and he hadn’t slept much for wondering if he would ever get his magic back. A week before the school year started he had felt it tingling in his fingertips again but the momentarily relief had been quickly bulldozed by the fact that it had come back so hot and so wild he shattered things and/or made them float just touching them, he sweat through his shirt after under an hour, and whenever he tried even a simple spell (without a wand, which dulled it some) it happened fiftyfold with a burst of static electricity. When he tried to heat water for coffee it turned instantly to steam. When he tried to get a stain out of his pants it burned a neat and perfect unsinged hole in them instead. Memorably, he tried _Alohomora_ upon losing his office key and blew the door off its hinges. He thought he had developed an unfortunate immunity to the potions Dr. Menuck had recommended years previously because neither of them really helped at all anymore — nor did the alternatives recommended by Sanderson and Sprout, nor did smoking pot. 

He had intended to start his fifth year classes with magic demonstration but as that was now impossible lest he destroy his classroom he set up instead an emergency field trip to the magically resonant stone circle in Daviot, Aberdeenshire. He had Sprout make the Portkey because he was nervous that any he made would whisk him and his students back in time or to another dimension (he made a note to try that in his retirement) and he made copies of the course syllabus and Discussion Questions for the trip and then he made a thermos of coffee the Muggle way. By the time he got to his classroom a few of his students were already there. The fifth years who took Magical Theory as an elective were sometimes overachievers, or they were vaguely spiritual, or they had just tried psychedelic drugs for the first time. Or they were Muggleborn and equal parts fascinated and confused by their capability. Those who stuck around through sixth and seventh year toward the notoriously impossible NEWT exam were primarily the overachievers. 

Sirius handed out the syllabus and the Discussion Questions to the early arrivals. Two Gryffindors, six Ravenclaws, a Hufflepuff, and a Slytherin he recognized as their Quidditch team’s best Chaser. When the rest of the students arrived and Sirius took attendance they all collected their paperwork, tucked it in their bags, and gathered around the Portkey, which whisked them quickly to the wizarding pub a couple blocks from the stone circle. As it was only ten AM just the bartender, who had been expecting their arrival, was on the premises, magicking a mop across the sticky floor. 

“Really,” said the Slytherin chaser, “a dive bar?” 

“Close your eyes for a moment and send your consciousness into the earth for the resonance,” Sirius told her. She crossed her arms frustratedly over her chest. Those of the students who had clearly shared a joint before arriving two minutes late, however, stalwartly attempted it. “Do you feel anything?” Sirius asked them. 

“Like a tiny pinch,” said one, a Hufflepuff girl with sleek black hair and a bevy of punk band pins on her lapel. 

“Yes, that’s good. We’re close enough some of you might be able to feel a pinch.” 

Together they walked up the road in the quiet foggy morning past the fields, overachievers in the front, Sirius in the middle, stoners in the back; the customary configuration. The stoners were giggling, then he heard one of them belt out some Nirvana lyrics. When he turned and smiled they froze, then they giggled some more. He made a mental note to lend them his Jesus Lizard cassette. 

They stopped and stood thoughtfully like their own magical circle at the top of the driveway down to the site. “Before we go down there let’s read the Discussion Questions,” Sirius told them, “then have them fresh on your minds while we walk around. We don’t have to talk about all of them today so hang onto the ones that feel the best to you. Once we get down there you can go anywhere you want as long as you can feel the resonance and see me, okay?” 

“How do we know if we feel the resonance,” said the Slytherin chaser. She had crossed her arms over her chest again, but now she seemed worried. 

“That’s a very good question. For everyone it feels different. The way it feels to you might have to do with experiences you’ve had before. For me it always feels like there’s someone I can’t see watching me.” He saw the black-haired Hufflepuff girl nodding; clearly she had a handle on it. “Does anyone else have an experience with magical resonance who wants to share their feeling?” 

A quiet mousy boy who reminded Sirius disturbingly of Peter said “Like water dripping down the back of my neck.” 

“Like when you know you’ve sunburned but you can’t quite see it yet — like a skin stretching,” said one of the stoners. 

“Good one,” Sirius said. “Any more?” 

“Like the sort of muted blunted feeling when someone does something nice for you.” 

“Like a wind you can’t feel but you see.” 

“Like still water lapping.” 

“Like music from a thousand miles away.” 

“All very good,” said Sirius. “Has everyone read the Discussion Questions?” 

Nods abounded. They went down the driveway to the circle. This time all the students followed Sirius nervously except the Slytherin chaser who walked close next to him, arms still crossed. “Are you worried you won’t feel it?” he asked her. She just looked at him and didn’t answer but he saw a big scared yes in her face. “Walk around for a while and try to reach into the ground and into the stones. Like ball up your magic and send it in. If you have a hard time find me, okay?” 

“Alright,” she said quietly. She was probably one of those who couldn’t admit when they were struggling. For years he had had students like that who got miles past the breaking point before they snapped and cried in his office. They felt like they were losing their magic or like they were secretly a squib who had somehow survived Hogwarts for five years to date. Sirius told them his theory, which was that they were simply a product of evolution. They were losing the capability to feel and feed off resonance because they didn’t need to — it was purely present in themselves. Only sometimes did this make them feel better. 

When they reached the stones he let the students coo and ahh like a bevy of strange birds and wander in the mist in their black robes about the site, sometimes with eyes closed or arms spread, some of them standing very still and staring at the ground. Sirius for his part felt the excess of magic in his blood and in that place spilling over like a too-full milkshake and he put his hands in his pockets to hide they were shaking. He didn’t want to know what would happen if he tried magic. 

The black-haired Hufflepuff punk was sitting cross-legged in the grass with her hair cascading over her face (the ends of it brushed the turf) and the heels of her hands pressing into her eyes. Her back rose and fell ponderously and a couple times she shivered. Sirius went over and crouched — “Are you alright?” In his first few years he had had students quit the class (and once, drop entirely out of Hogwarts) after falling too far in on their first field trip. Since then he had learned to read the signs and run interference. 

She lifted her head and her eyes refocused and she eyed him. At first he was vaguely worried, then she smiled. “Yes,” she said, “God, yeah. That thing watching you, like when you get close enough, you’re with it in the same room.” 

“Yes,” he said, nervously. “Be careful.” 

“I am careful,” she said, “really I am.” 

“Have you thought about the Discussion Questions?” 

“Gearing up to it.” She shivered again, scrunching her nose. “Really I’m perfectly alright.” 

He let the students walk around a little while longer while he checked his course roster. The Slytherin chaser was named Taylor Montcalm and she was technically a Duchess. The Hufflepuff punk was Riley Song. Already he could tell they would be his two most interesting students, for better or worse. 

When they had about an hour left before the return Portkey he gathered the students and they went over the Discussion Questions in the patented Professor Black method. “Anyone want to speak to Question One?” 

_How do you think ancient wizards and witches used this site?_

The mousy Peter-ish boy raised his hand. “Weren’t the stone circles used for astronomy?” 

“Good,” said Sirius, “that’s the Muggle conclusion. We can certainly chalk up the same idea to the layout of the stones themselves. What about the resonance?” 

“Focusing,” said Taylor Montcalm. “Collecting and concentrating power for ritual.” 

“Someone did the reading,” said Sirius, “well done. What about Question Two?” 

_Why do you think this place is magically resonant? In other words, where did the resonance come from?_

“Human sacrifices,” said one of the stoners, swaying on their feet. 

“Certainly connected to some resonant sites,” Sirius explained, “as are ancient burial grounds. They’ve found cremated remains here. But certainly corpses of whatever variety are not endemic to every magically resonant landmark.” 

“Electromagnetic disturbances.” 

“Love the scientific approach. What else?” 

“Ley lines.” 

“Aliens.” 

“Good!” 

He could see them reaching deep. Riley Song had closed her eyes again. “Ancient people knowing something we don’t,” she said. 

“Another one — I love that theory. We’ll get into it around week six. What about Question Three?” 

Students usually skipped this one. _Many wizards report feeling outside impulses or spiritual “suggestion” at magically resonant sites. Did you feel something? What was it? Why do you think this is?_

Indeed they were all quiet. Finally Riley Song said “I wanted to sleep. But maybe just ‘cause…” She giggled, as did the rest of the stoners. 

“I did too,” said the mousy boy nervously. 

“I always feel sleepy here, too,” said Sirius. “There’s another one, in Cornwall; I’m trying to get permission to take us all there. But it’s always made me cry. Not even like a Dementor, surfacing all your bad memories — it’s just, this compulsion to weep. Like cutting onions. Another one, in the Hebrides, which we definitely can’t get close to on account of all the deaths, it makes you want to fight. But the theory about this place is that it existed for rituals involving trances. Whether it was designed — created by ancient people with some knowledge we don’t have, as you said — or simply they found it this way, as though it were some natural phenomenon, or perhaps, yes, aliens, is yet unknown. Certainly they marked it with the stones, astrologically as you’ve said, around 1500 BC.” 

“Why astrologically if it has this earthly power?” said one of the Ravenclaws. 

“Well, that’s why people say aliens. Good question though — we’ll talk about that a little more in a couple weeks. Anyone have thoughts about Question Four?” 

_What do you think you could use this place’s magic for?_

“I felt like I could do anything — any spell I wanted.” 

“Yeah, me too, but I felt like if I did it, it would happen — differently than usual.” 

“Yes,” said Sirius, “good. Anyone else?” 

“It felt heavy, like — we learned about magical signatures in Defense. But I could feel like it would be writing or signing its own signature through me.” 

“Good,” Sirius told them. “Important thing to realize. Many wizards and witches especially those of the Dark persuasion have attempted to harness the power of magically resonant places to notoriously terrible ends. It’s something that must be undertaken with respect and with caution.” 

“So we shouldn’t try magic ever when we’re in these places?” This from Taylor Montcalm.

“Not necessarily. If you just try a quick spell it’ll certainly be alright. I mean, drawing energy from this place into your own magic — that can be very dangerous. But by the end of this year, we’ll be able to do it together. It’s usually on the OWL.” 

“What spell will we do?” 

“Usually they want you to do protective magic, like _Protego_. So we’ll practice with that one and a few others. Last one — Question Five, anyone?” 

_Why did we come here today? How is magical resonance relevant to magical theory?_

“Magical resonance is the — the purest and the most primal,” said Taylor Montcalm, practically reciting from the introduction to the _Beginners’ Guide_ they were supposed to have read before the first class. “This is the oldest magic we can trace so it gives us clues to our origins.” 

“Yes, exactly that. We’ll speak about many other theories in class but this is the one about which many scholars including myself find ourselves, ah, least skeptical. Why we can do what we do is connected inexorably to why this place can do what it can do. And so by investigating places like this — in so doing we investigate ourselves.” 

The stoners were wide-eyed staring and rocking but Riley Song had closed her eyes. Sirius let the wind move through them for a minute and he felt even the skeptics reach down nervously through their feet into the soil. 

“Alright then,” he said, “Five points to the house of everyone who spoke up — extra five to Slytherin, because Taylor clearly did the reading.” It no longer pained him to assign points to a house he had once loathed. He took that as a clear sign of his adulthood. “Shall we go home now?” 

\--

They walked briskly along the road to the wizarding pub where the second Portkey awaited them, and as such they arrived back at Hogwarts in time for the students to run to their next classes and for Sirius to greet his sixth year class in the hallway, half of whom tended to drop immediately after the first session. He was brutally honest with them that the NEWT was very difficult and that the sixth and seventh year classes would reflect that especially in the quantity of reading and writing they would be expected to do. Slytherin ambition and Ravenclaw brains meant oftentimes they were the only houses represented by seventh year. Most Gryffindors wanted to do their seventh year project in Defense Against the Dark Arts (as James and Peter had) and Hufflepuffs tended to stray from the abstract, for which he could only applaud them. 

Indeed of the twenty-student sixth year class he watched over half eye the stocked syllabus with fear and regret. Two Gryffindor students made a break for the exit after only ten minutes and once they had shut the door behind them Sirius said, trying very hard to keep his tone light, “Anyone else who wants to drop right off the bat feel free to follow their lead.” 

Only three more did, though Sirius suspected several others were just too tactful to leave in the middle of the first class. 

“We’ll do a lot of independent research this year… primarily, I’ll expect you to choose one of the popularly accepted theories of magical resonance and/or instinctive magic and write a full research paper, six feet of parchment, yes, as tall as some of you, defending it or declaiming it. Also, lots of trips, lots and lots of trips, we’re going all over the UK and I’m lobbying the trustees for a license to take you all to France… I’m shooting for Lascaux but Niaux will do, and it’s much less overrun by Muggle tourists. Also, a lot more spellwork this year than last year, I’m talking graduate level spells because I know you’re capable — beginner terramancy, spell history… the sort of work that scholars call source codes. We’re going to start thinking beyond the theories we talked about last year, into the meat and potatoes of it all. Sound alright?” 

Two of them (predictably, a Slytherin and a Ravenclaw) nodded; the rest had blanched. 

“Alright,” said Sirius, “well, you can drop classes anytime before September 8th and I have heard sixth year Muggle Studies is very interesting. It’s mostly talk about Muggle religion… intriguing stuff.” 

He had brought some resonant artifacts from the Hogwarts collection for them to look at and he let them observe and touch and take notes and sketch until it was time to shoo them out and welcome in his seventh year class, who by this point were thoroughly resigned to their fate. There were only six of them, four wan and big-eyed in the manner of library rats, one the hawk-eyed and strange Ravenclaw seeker, the sixth a tattooed Hufflepuff girl from Portugal who no doubt was talented but had also probably remained in the class mostly due to her fairly obvious crush on Sirius. He gave them the syllabus and they didn't talk about it; rather they tucked it into their bags. “What are you guys thinking about for your seventh year projects?” Sirius asked. 

“A new theory and ranking of Pictish standing stones,” said the Ravenclaw seeker. 

“Resonance in the early American colonies… I’m currently working with a few contacts in the old Massachusetts witches’ clubs.” 

“Instinctive magic strength and frequency by parentage,” said one of the Slytherins. He was a distant cousin of the Notts and had not taken any of Sirius’s anti-blood purist science to heart. The Hufflepuff girl and one of the Ravenclaws eyed him reproachfully. 

“Also with instinctive magic,” said someone else. “A study of the manifestation of primary accidental spellwork in young children.” 

“Nice,” said Sirius, “I’ve yet to read a good paper on P.A.S. Who else?” 

“Mediterranean folkloric representations of resonance,” said the Hufflepuff girl. 

And the last, a quiet Ravenclaw from Ramallah who had spoken quietly to Sirius at the end of the previous year about the pathways he would need to take to become a researcher in magical maladies: “Magically resonant artifacts in treatment of magic loss disorders.” 

“That’s great, Kadir. Have you read Lester on treatment of magic loss disorders through psychedelic compounds? Some of which I think a few scholars have claimed can have magical resonance…” 

He watched Kadir and half the rest of the class write that down. 

“Once a week we can use this class as study hall for your projects and for the NEWT,” Sirius told them, “the second day we’ll do a trip, and the third class we’ll workshop. I’ll expect you all to have material for workshop every week from here on out — even just a potential source, a theory, an outline, you get the gist. After Christmas break it will have to be written content from your paper.” 

“Won't we need to learn new spellwork and theories for the NEWT?” 

“Most of it we already know. The NEWT is always a lot of history, and they’ll want you to demonstrate source coding and some minimal terramancy at a site you’ll take a Portkey or Apparate to. Then there's a very lengthy essay which is either going to be about resonance theory or instinctive theory. Which you all will have a handle on, because of your projects. Sound alright?” 

He walked them out and then happened to walk with Kadir to the library; he himself was in search of the latest issue of _Ancient Curses Review,_ which he knew Pince always received a week late, and Kadir was after the Lester paper. “It’s either in — there’s a whole journal about psychedelics in wizarding history. That’s what my senior project was about.” Kadir snorted laughter to hear that. “Or maybe um, I think it’s called _Alternative Approaches to Magical Maladies._ It was — May of 1987, when it came out; I’m pretty sure.” 

They found their respective journals and Sirius took his with him intending to return to his office and have a swig of the magic calming potion, drink a full mug of lavender tea, smoke a joint, and perhaps, with all that, be able to successfully repair a torn sweater and a stained pair of pants without setting them both on fire. As such he was rather distracted when he turned the corner on the stairs and ran into a very short first year — singed robes, wild black hair, bright green flash of eyes — who of course was his godson, James’s child, the Boy Who Lived, et cetera. 

“Sorry,” said Harry Potter; Sirius had dropped his _Ancient Curses Review_ and Harry bent to get it. “Sorry, I’m so sorry, you see, the stairs.” 

“It takes getting used to,” said Sirius. His voice was wobbly. “The stairs.” 

Harry had carefully arranged his hair to cover his scar probably because he wanted to attempt relative anonymity, which of course was impossible. The students were buzzing about it — his presence, his existence — even those who were too young to remember what had happened. In the ‘80s there had been a few who remembered Sirius’s name from the wartime _Prophet_ who had whispered to one another between sympathetic glances at him before he would start class. 

I’m your godfather, Sirius tried to say, I’m your godfather — me. We would go to the beach and the playground. I’m sure you don’t remember. 

“I’m — um, Professor Black,” he said finally. It felt terribly wrong to say it that way. “I teach magical theory, just OWLs and above, so…” 

“There’s a girl in my year who wants to take your class,” said Harry. “She won’t stop talking about it. I think she’s crazy. She said she read your books and all that. Her name’s Hermione Granger.” 

Hermione Granger, age 11, had already written Sirius asking to test in to magical theory in her fourth year, to which he had not yet responded. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I know. She wrote me a letter.” Harry laughed. He looked so like James that Sirius, possessed by nostalgia, blurted, “I was friends with your dad at school.” 

The young and familiar face changed; the mouth twisted. “Really?” 

“Yes. And your mum so, if you ever need help, I can help.” 

It was so lame, like so so pathetic and lame, and he remembered, so help him, the first time he had ever confronted Remus about the furry little problem. As he recalled he had said something not dissimilar and Remus had shrunk just a little but Sirius could sense he had done it to bring his center of gravity lower in preparation for a fight. I don’t know how to help you, he had wanted to say, and he knew that if he said it he would start crying; I don’t know how to help you but I want to and I’m trying to figure it out. It was toward the end of first year; they were twelve years old. 

When Harry looked up at Sirius the determined sort of face he had on was a brutal blast of painful nostalgia. He was wondering about what he would say for a second; James had always done this, when he was trying to flirt, when he was conceptualizing a prank. Finally he said, “What’s up with Professor Quirrell?” 


	9. Chapter 9

**Azkaban**   
_ June 1993 _

Because it was not necessarily a very good thought (he could not yet be sure he would survive it) another twenty-five days in starving Dementor company had not erased the conceptuality and reasonability of escape from Remus’s mind. It did however prevent him from thinking of much other than plunging into the sea and, following, tearing assorted throats out with such vividness he could almost taste the salt. The soft ghostly dream light of Dumbledore’s Patronus when he brought the first course of the sixth trial, gently placed the bone chalice inside Remus’s cell, and watched him drink felt as usual like a wash of dizzying and breathless clarity. 

“What did you end up using instead of banana slug extract?” 

“Spanish slug,” said Dumbledore, in all seriousness. “Quite similar and much cheaper and as they are in fact an invasive species I feel not much guilt about salting them for their goo.” 

“The mint’s more flavorful this time,” Remus said. 

“Indeed, banana slug extract has a rather overpowering flavor…” He reached in the cell and took back the chalice. 

Two days later the sixth trial transformation went as had become normal: he counted to one-hundred through the twisting and stretching inside-outness of the changing, stood up, looked into the door and acknowledged Dumbledore when his name was called, then watched the contingent and their Patronuses wander down the hallway to send the necessary owls regarding the trial’s success. Then he shrank back as close as he could manage to the back wall and he waited. 

Later he would chalk it up to the rare wind through the South-facing window. A few Dementors passed the door before one hesitated. It wore a scapular of baubles — powerful sucking un-thing reaching toward him with the strands of itself. Its darkness traced along the floor black and viscous like wet velvet and at last when it passed over Remus in the corner he felt its querying and its confusion but he did not feel its coldness. In the past when they had touched him it had been unbearable — dry ice frigid and devouring. Now it felt like being passed through by a not-unfriendly ghost. 

It thought he was dead, he realized. It rattled at the locks. For the second time in twelve years the door opened and hardly thinking — animal thinking — he darted around the creature and went out. As though that cage were just a door. 

He had not been in this hallway since he was brought through it in 1981 and he moved silently keeping to the shadowy darkness around the puddled golden gaslight and he trotted past more creatures hovering in the doorways of more cages containing screaming and sobbing amorphous inhuman begging for death or sleep and as such they did not even turn to see him. He was nothing to them, he realized, like this. They couldn’t feel his mind which was their sustenance and also their proof of his life. It was moderately ironic — this place made humans into animals but actual animals it could not touch. As such, he reasoned, it was just a matter of not running into Dumbledore and the rest on his way out, but he recalled the previous trials’ forays to send owls had lasted hours. 

In the shadows he followed the smell of the ocean and the salt into the antechamber where he had been brought chained in silver by MLE officers in that brutal November on a night he did not remember but remembered remembering. He went out that door, past the heavily warded barracks in which the human guards slept, wreathed in protective spells and hung with aromatic herbs, and down the dock where the boat which brought new prisoners from Fraserburgh stopped in the mornings. The boards were wet with spray and his paws made no sound. The high and swollen white moon whose light was cast through by the shadows of the ever-hunting birds. His heart was racing — not joy, not nothing. Simply necessity. At the end of the dock he took a running leap into the sea, into another endless suffocating wet world, where the cold and the dark closed over him and through him, breathless ice, lung-squeezing, life-proving. Benediction, baptism, rebirth, unbirth. At the surface he breathed. Then he swam. In all the night he never looked back at the castle. 

\--

After the full moon in Guern of course he did wake up when the sun split the horizon. He was alone at the clearing naked and trembling in the rime of frost and light, and one of his eyes was full of blood. The resonance of that place had cocooned him in itself against the pain which he could feel as a sort of possessing ghost. The wolf inside him crying. He could feel something was wrong with his face and elsewhere. His hands — his belly, his thigh, his shoulder… The bones were wrong, the skin was wrong. When it had put him back in this self it had tried to do what it could with the broken places but there was only so much that was possible because there were so many broken places. 

In the frost were the tracks of dogs and humans. They could not have thought he would die here; they understood the resonance. They wanted him to use it. Why he could not yet discern. 

He reached his scattered consciousness into it and wrapped it around himself — reaching, reaching. Golden threads like vines he pulled around until he felt stitched enough together to attempt what had to be done. The place he was going he drew up before him in full hallucinatory detail. Destination — determination — deliberation — 

The eye he opened, the eye that could see. Portraits — and the glowing of the Pensieve from the armoire. The red bird delicate with false youth who could not fly to him to cry. All the thread was gone so he felt it creeping up on him as a monster from the shattering in his head. He heard his name, then not much. 

It felt like he blinked his eyes and woke up in the hospital though later they told him it had been seven days. There was a dark blur with him who held his hand and smelled like nervous unshowered sweat and cigarette smoke and lavender — whose speech was layered and slow and strange like a record played at the wrong speed. He tried the name because he knew it but he couldn’t fit it in his mouth and eventually everything turned black again. He blinked. This time when he opened his eyes outside it was raining through the far window. He was plugged into all these noodle cables pumping clear stuff like a patient in a Muggle soap opera. On account of it the pain was sort of dull and removed like it was happening to someone else, or in a dream. In the chair beside him was Sirius who was asleep and who was holding his hand. Gently Remus squeezed it but Sirius didn’t wake up. He was a heavy sleeper — he slept though thunderstorms and music blaring from passing cars at night and drunks fighting in the street after the bars closed. 

_Black birds._ The stuff was plugged into the inside of Remus’s arm and the back of his free hand and carefully he reached across himself with it pulling uncomfortably the needles and the tape and the bandages, and he turned Sirius’s forearm over. He wasn’t sure what even he was looking for; he knew the Dark Mark only showed up when Voldemort touched his own to summon his foresworn. Yet there had to be some evidence… 

Sirius woke up; his eyelashes fluttered. Remus’s heart broke and the pieces of it fell like many cold stones into his belly. “Moony,” he said, “hi, Moony.” He stood, they kissed, chastely, just a press of lips. It tasted like too many cigarettes. 

“What are all these things,” Remus asked; his voice hardly worked. 

“This is for your pain,” said Sirius, tugging gently on one of the cords. “And this one is like, vitamins and stuff they said, because you’ve been out for so long.” 

“How long?” 

“Well for a week you were in a magical coma. Then they lifted it, and you woke up for a second but then you passed out again. That was two days ago.” Sirius searched his face for something. His eyes were unslept red and the skin underneath was very thin and purple with crepuscular shading. Delicately gingerly like he would break something if he did it he leaned forward and hugged Remus tightly. He was warm, he smelled like smoke and hospital, a bit of stale booze, old sweat, fear, lavender. Remus pressed his nose into his neck and inhaled. Evidence, there would be evidence. His arms felt like they weighed nine thousand pounds each and they were full of implements which tugged and rattled but he lifted them to wrap tightly around Sirius’s back and shoulders. “Remus,” Sirius said. He very rarely called Remus by anything other than Moony except on certain carnal occasions and also if they were having a very serious discussion which was rare. Sirius sounded on the verge of tears; it hadn’t gone like this since the Great and Terrible Moment of Forgiveness, fifth year. “Oh, God,” Sirius said wetly, “Remus.” 

“I’m alright,” Remus lied. His voice was muffled against Sirius’s sweat-humid neck. “It’s alright.” 

“They ripped — God. What happened?” 

Sirius pulled back gently and sat on the edge of the bed. The dark sleepless rings under his eyes were damp and seemed to glow in the soft light. At the sight of it something shattered. 

“I thought,” Remus said. The thick heavy lump in his throat made his voice sound deeper and softer. “I tried. I really tried.” 

“I believe you,” Sirius told him, “I know you did.” When Remus tried to undo his dressing gown and see what had been done Sirius took his hands and stopped him. “Don’t look at it now.” 

“Is it bad?” 

“You know I — you shouldn’t ask me cause I think your scars are sexy.” But he said this kind of chokedly. Still Remus tried a laugh. “They said maybe you wouldn’t wake up and they said they _sewed_ you, you know, like Muggles do.” 

“I’ve had stitches before,” Remus told him. 

“These are big a-and thick black thread and horrible.” 

He had not witnessed Sirius’s nervous stuttering since the Great and Terrible Moment of Forgiveness. 

“I’m going to kill the old man when he gets here,” Sirius went on. “I tried to duel him when I first saw you.” 

The noise Remus made was a kind of hiccup sob. “How’d he take that?” 

“Full body bind.” He showed half his teeth; his smile was very nervous. “Not as bad as Nott’s.” 

“Nott’s were like, you couldn’t breathe,” Remus remembered. “Voldemort probably recruited him just for his full body binds.” 

“I’m certain,” said Sirius. “He has no other redeeming qualities.” 

“He thought you were a vampire.” 

“Did he really?” 

“Yes, did I never tell you? He cornered me in the hallway. Fourth year? He said he was sharpening his broom handle for the next Quidditch match… I nearly out and told him, you’ve got the wrong one of us, mate.” 

Sirius was laughing with his face kind of turned away and his eyelashes were wet and clumped together against his cheek. 

_Black birds_. 

“Anyway he’s a fucking idiot,” Remus said. “Like the rest of them and like all of us.” 

“You were following orders,” said Sirius, who had stopped laughing. 

“Yes. Fucking idiot orders like a fucking idiot.” 

“Something will come of it.” 

He sounded awfully sure. 

“I don’t think so,” Remus said, “I really don’t.” 

“I’m very proud of you,” said Sirius. “You’re very brave. Braver than me.” He smiled — bitter and wounded. Healing. There was a tear inside his eye magnifying strangely the veins, which had not fallen. “I love you.” 

It was so funny that he could suspect Sirius as a spy in half his brain and in the other half could feel torn apart, stretched on a rack, dismantled and disassembled and fractured by guilt over what certainly qualified as cheating. Cheating with someone who turned his stomach — someone whose touch made him want to die. But it was still cheating. He remembered with a sudden cold shock his certainty he’d caught something from Greyback. But he had been silent for too long, and the smile on Sirius’s face was faltering. “Love you,” Remus told him, “I love you too.” 

He took Sirius’s hand and traced his fingers down across the pattern of veins inside his forearm to the inside crease of his elbow. Perhaps if he was always touching it he would see it — he would feel it when the truth came out. The wounds upon his hands were red and raw and the skin was growing back together and most of the injuries were too shallow to have been stitched or bandaged but they were greasy and slick with ointment and the skin around them was inflamed. Blood and bruises under all his broken fingernails. “I would’ve died,” Sirius said, “Moony, I would’ve — ”

“Don’t say that,” Remus told him. He tried for soothing but his voice was teary and it broke a little. “No you wouldn’t’ve.” 

Hypocrite, he thought, of himself. 

In a little bit the nurse came in and sent Sirius to wait in the atrium for the guests who were en route. She replaced the emptying bags of potion attached to the needles in Remus’s arms and hands with full fresh ones. Then she helped Remus open his dressing gown so she could change the necessary bandages. The pristine white fabric of some of them was staining yellow as old parchment. They wrapped nearly his entire side and the lower ridge of his ribs where they met his belly. His thighs and his left shoulder. Elsewhere where the wounds were more superficial like the ones on his hands they had left them open and unbandaged to heal. Tearing clawmarks — variant stretching tooth patterns. Many different mouths. “You lost a lot of blood,” said the nurse. “A _lot_. It took half the Healers on this ward to keep you stable while we had werewolf blood express owled from Manchester.” 

“Is Dumbledore coming?” 

“Yes; he and a few other friends were alerted when you regained consciousness.” 

“Before they get here,” said Remus, swallowing the lump in his throat, humiliation, fear, guilt, “I need to tell you — I need to have tests done, um, all of it, Aberystwyth, Renegade’s, Ghawdex, all the Muggle ones —” 

The nurse furrowed her brow tightly but then she ironed it out again, seeing his discomfort. “That’s fine. I’ll order a full run now. We have your blood already and that usually suffices for the lab.” 

“Don’t tell anybody,” Remus said, hopelessly. 

“Of course not.” Her smile was sweet but brittle. “You’ve been very brave,” she said. She and Sirius — that made two. Remus was not entirely sure he agreed with any of it. 

James and Lily brought flowers and a big stuffed animal made for Muggle children whose tag said _Timber wolf_ but which looked more like an American coyote. Remus put it on the back of the bed and rested his head against its itchy flank. Lily touched the bandages across his face with very delicate fingers — the nails she had colored black with permanent marker — and her mouth was just open and her eyes were bright and sorry but she didn’t say anything. James just kept tousling Remus’s hair mindful of the long clawed scrapes up the back of his skull. His glasses were fingerprinted and there was an ink stain at his collar. Sirius was in the door looking tired and jealous, and then Remus saw him speaking hushedly to Dumbledore. 

“Perhaps you two should take Sirius home,” Dumbledore said at last, sweeping forward to press a hand to James’s shoulder and the other to Lily’s elbow. “I’m sure he’d relish the opportunity to sleep in his own bed.” Over all the shoulders Sirius met Remus’s eyes with an exhausted and abstract yearning. Surreptitiously he blew a kiss; Remus thought he felt it on his cheek. He closed his eyes. Shifting and bustling and then the door shut. A chair grated across the floor, and the light changed. When he opened his eyes Dumbledore was sitting beside his bed, fingers steepled. Remus thought perhaps he had been dreading this since he had boarded the train to Calais. “I would love to hear what you remember of what happened, Remus,” Dumbledore said. 

Why didn’t you tell me it was going to be like that, he almost said. Why didn’t you teach me how to press things down and hide them away? Dumbledore must’ve known he could manage it, he told himself, burying the ugly piece that whispered the alarm: he knew you could take it because you were made to take it _._

“Brittany,” Remus said, “this nothing town, Guern. Probably they aren’t there anymore. They had seized a farmhouse near this magically resonant landmark — just a clearing in the forest.” 

“That’s where you were left for dead?” 

“Yes. I could pick it up, like thread — it helped me.” 

“I wondered as to how you Apparated in your condition. Do continue.” 

“There were thirty of them who lived on the property but on the full moon I think there were forty or fifty. Greyback is the leader and then there’s an Englishwoman, Leigh.” 

“Yes. Baroness Evelyn Leigh Sargent Salisbury. Heir to one of the largest fortunes in England which she forfeited the day she was bitten, age fourteen. She is thought to be one of his first surviving victims.” 

She had had a sort of regal bearing about her, Remus remembered, and her sharp hawk nose. “Owls would come every day in the afternoon. He said he corresponded with Bellatrix Lestrange almost daily. Um, they are waiting for orders to cross the Channel. Greyback insinuated they were waiting on word from a — from a spy. Within my old friends he said.” 

He thought of Sirius in the door — like being pulled from Remus’s side caused him physical pain. Of course it was possible Sirius could have turned coat and still loved him. He remembered the thick callused thumb that pressed his teeth to feel the sharpness. “Ah,” said Dumbledore, “yes, we have suspected.” 

“He said — Albus.” He had never before dared to call Dumbledore by his first name. “He said something funny.” 

When we were lying in bed together, and I felt suffocated by filth, and he had just been inside me, and I knew I was hollow. 

“He said — blackbirds of a feather.” 

“Interesting turn of phrase,” said Dumbledore. 

“He meant Bellatrix and the spy,” Remus explained. He could not believe he had to hammer this home. “Black birds.” 

At this Dumbledore leant back in his chair. “Ah.” 

“Yes.” 

“I was under the impression you and Sirius were rather — ” 

“I don’t know whether or not to believe it. Because it was likely he just said it to mess with my head.” 

Dumbledore pursed his lips contemplatively. “I wouldn’t know what to tell you. Indeed I wouldn’t put it past him to — poison you against the human world. But it indeed seems likely there is somebody on the inside.” He smiled at Remus in a fragile false way. “Keep an eye on Sirius for me. We will discuss this again the next time we speak. Is there anything else you need to tell me now?” 

Remus started to tell him about the arsenal he had given up on the Scottish coast: “I had to give him something so he would trust me — ” 

“Yes,” said Dumbledore; “the nurse told me you ordered those tests. Probably a smart move. The Order of course will cover all the costs, treatment et cetera.” 

All the recycled and new blood in his whole body had rushed to his face and he had to look away. “Not that,” he said, so quietly he had to repeat himself. “That’s not what I mean.” 

“What else could there be?” 

“I had to give him something — information. So that he would believe me, that I was really defecting.” 

“Ah,” said Dumbledore, for the thousandth time; it never got much easier to stomach. 

“They know about the arsenal on the coast near Oban.” 

Something darkened briefly in Dumbledore’s eyes but quickly they cleared again. He stood. “Thank you, Remus,” he said. “Will that be all?” 

Yes, yes. How much blood? And dignity, and trust? “Yes, that’s all.” 

\--

All the tests came up negative but Remus had his blood tested twice more before he believed it. On February 7 1979 — a month before his nineteenth birthday, more than two months after he had left for Calais — he was allowed to leave the hospital for the flat in Chalk Farm. In his January transformation, which he underwent in the basement cells at St. Mungo’s, he had ripped out half his stitches and they had had to be replaced. Sirius had some appointment he wouldn’t say much about so Remus was obliged to find his own way home in the early afternoon knowing with a great circling sadness like vultures that it was going to be like this from here on out. When he walked he felt the things that hadn’t healed right stretch his skin and on the tube he got more stares than usual what with his face the way it was now. In the flat it looked like none of the dishes had been done since Remus’s departure for France. Records were strewn all over the coffee table in the soft cold sunlight and he saw Sirius had bought a few new ones: Wire’s newest LP, _Chairs Missing_ , and Kate Bush’s _Lionheart._ On the turntable was Talking Heads’ _More Songs about Buildings and Food_. Sirius had stopped it in the middle of “Warning Sign,” which seemed disappointingly portentous. 

There was a note on the kitchen table tucked under a dirty coffee mug: _Dear Moony I promise I was going to clean up for you but I was summoned by the old man. Do not touch a thing — please sit on the couch and listen to the new records — and I will be home by five or six probably. Love, Pads_

Remus burned it in his fingers and turned the record up louder and ran a bath, which necessitated his first scrubbing the ring of mildew around the bathtub as much as he could without ripping open the freshly unstitched wounds. He found Sirius’s weed in a sock in the dresser and rolled a joint and finally he undressed and peeled off all the bandages careful not to look too closely at the wounds, or at himself in the mirror. In the bath he lit a bunch of candles and turned the lights off and sang along with David Byrne tinny and soft on the stereo from the other room — “Damn that television — what a bad picture — ” 

He had not before looked at all the wounds at once and in the candlelit golden darkness they just seemed like an array of abstract tattoos. Like the vibrant and strange symbology marked upon the mummified bodies of ancient Picts. The warm water had turned them red and soft. In the quiet stoned fog in his head his body was just a body and thus reconcilable. It didn’t feel so much like a blow to think, this is what I look like now. It was just a quiet swallowable fact. 

He finished the joint and had a few cigarettes until the bath turned cold and he dried off and dressed in his own pajama pants and one of Sirius’s overlarge soft black t-shirts careful not to lift the water-soft scabs. The nurse had said he might try to have some time each day where he left the wounds unbandaged so the oxygen could get to them. He went to the stereo and put on the Wire record and he cleaned up and filed everything else away alphabetically and then he went to the kitchen to tackle the dishes. He was obliged to do them by hand as he had lost his wand in Brittany, and as such he was halfway through both the pile and the record when Sirius came home and up behind him at the sink. 

“Have you forgotten _lavelasanum_?” He had wrapped his arms around Remus’s belly and rested his chin on his shoulder. His skin was cold with February against Remus’s cheek and his wet hair and he could feel the buttons of Sirius’s coat against his back. 

“I lost my wand in France.” 

“You didn’t have to do the dishes, Moony.” 

“I didn’t know you were this hopeless without me,” Remus said. He took his hands from the suds and rinsed them off and crossed them over Sirius’s. Snuck his fingers inside the wrist of his jacket skimming over the tangle of veins and further. Sirius kissed his neck. His shifting his weight from foot to foot was like a strange hypnotic semblance of rocking. “I love you,” Remus told him helplessly. 

“Yes,” said Sirius; he had snuck his cold narrow nail-bitten hand under the loose waistband of Remus’s pajama pants. “I love you. It’s not how it’s supposed to be, when you’re not here.” 

He could feel Sirius’s lungs expand against his back. Ghost of stubble. His warmth. He would be able to tell, he told himself for the nth time, if it was. The cold gentle fingers inside his shirt skated over the tears at the base of his ribs and then the palm pressed entire over them as if to draw the poison out. Gently Remus put his head back on Sirius’s shoulder and he felt the sharp starving intake of breath in his spine. Let go, he was telling himself; he was trying. Let go, let it go. But in the end he couldn’t, and he didn’t for another two and a half years. 

\--

The solitary swimming wolf that was Remus had just come into sight of the Scottish mainland when the sun slipped up from where it had begun to turn the horizon grey and the body he wore was snatched out from under him like a rug or a tablecloth. In the month he had planned his escape he hadn’t been able to think enough to suspect this would happen or fear it might and all in the night he had been too focused on swimming to consider it but now of course it seemed very obvious that it would happen this way. Perhaps a Navy burial had been the eternal fate of his body, he considered; certainly they would have thrown him in the sea if he had died in Azkaban, and now he couldn’t stay afloat while it twisted him, stretched him and shrunk him, ripped him inside out; the water was so cold and heavy he felt entombed in ice, like his blood and his bones had frozen, and it shocked his heart such that he felt it skip, and his mind and the jelly of his eyes — and becoming human in the cold sea a sudden wash of swallowed and hidden and devoured memory he thought he had lost rushed back to him, flood of nostalgia and adrenaline: Lily and James and Sirius and the child who pulled his hair. Joy — all the time before when there had been joy, and the sun through the window in the morning, spilling tea in the bed, they had dropped acid and they danced together in the living room, it was midnight, then it was later, then it was dawn — then his lungs screaming: UP UP UP — 

He tried — he pulled the water down but it would not go, there was not enough of him, not enough hands, enough muscle, not enough fat to float, only skin, only bones, only blood, and all of it was frozen. So he reached again, remembering the time he had done this before, not into the earth because there was none but into all the golden flood of the things he remembered now that he had mourned forgetting, and he thought, _help me —_

Then he breathed. Dawn. His father held him by the ribs and then let go. When Remus’s head went under Lyall pulled him back up. Good. Try again. Kick your legs like an eggbeater. The pond out back of the property in Castle Cary which Remus’s grandfather had stocked with catfish for some reason and they would nibble at the calluses on your feet and then they would slip away into the mud. And the pond was sun-warm as bathwater, and the breeze made summer-bright sounds in the trees. 

All this hurt; the memory and the oxygenlessness, slamming heartbeats, like a spike driven through his forehead. And the hunger like a cold stone wringing, and the shivering, which racked through him, his whole self heaving… 

It needs to be warm, he thought, like the pond on the moor; _help me_ — 

He couldn’t be sure if it was instinctive magic or hypothermia setting in but the shivering stopped. It didn’t quite feel like bathwater or even close but it was better than ice enough that he could tread water, and he could make his lungs expand. Askance, looming black, was the Scottish coast. He did not look behind him — he would not. He knew he would not see it now; it would be warded against the eyes of fishermen and oilmen wandering the coast in search of diminishing returns. 

There was just the getting there, and then he would kiss the sand, and walk inland. Certainly they had realized by dawn if not sooner that he was gone. They would know better than to assume he had drowned, and they would send MLE squads by cigarette boat and on broomsticks up and down the coast. He ducked his head and swam, a low breaststroke, keeping underwater as much as he could; he counted to five-hundred and took a break to tread water and listen for boats and recalculate his position and then he went on. 

In Azkaban the only song he could ever muster to his memory was Talking Heads’ “Born Under Punches” ( _take a look at these hands / take a look at these hands_ ) but now it was like all the songs he had ever known filled his head and played all at once. Finally he winnowed out just one from the orchestral melange blaring, and he could feel around it his mind working faster than it had in twelve years. It was Iggy Pop’s “Fall in Love with Me.” 

At the beginning of “Lust for Life” he and Sirius had pressed the little cartoony multicolor LSD tabs onto each other’s tongues and then they had sat back on opposite sides of the couch and waited for it. Sirius had a good deal more experience with psychedelics on account of his seventh year project but Remus was not uninitiated. When he opened his eyes he wasn’t sure how long it had been because he'd lost track of the record and everything, and Sirius was staring out the far window. His mouth was open and his brow was just furrowed and his hair was coming down from where he’d pulled it up and it stuck on his neck in his summer sweat. Remus could hear it and feel it raining in the street and on the windows and the roof because it pressed the humidity down out of the air even inside the flat. He reached into that feeling, and then he felt something else. 

He had only taken fifth year magical theory and then he’d quit. But they had gone to the chalk horses and the standing stones, and to Dinas Bran, and to the Red Castle in Angus and to Ravenglass, and he had closed his eyes and reached in the earth as the professor had instructed, and he had felt that thing, the thready golden presence thing that the textbooks called resonance. Of course he had felt it before on the moors of his youth and he had felt it on his family’s sparse and well-timed new moon vacations to prehistoric sites in France (his mother had had a hobbyist’s interest) and notably he would feel it again when it saved his life in Brittany in 1978, but on the couch in the flat in Chalk Farm he felt it, for the first time, between himself and Sirius. Stretching gold like threads of taffy. It was utterly impossible but also it explained everything — the way it had felt necessary or magnetic, the way he sometimes laid awake feeling utterly possessed by it. Like another very communicable sickness. Rabid feral wild love. They were only following the same directive they had followed to join the Order. The same directive that had brought them to Hogwarts and sorted them as it had. Wherever magic itself came from this too had come from that place…

On the stereo, the song. Sirius kind of snapped to consciousness. “Oh,” he said. Remus wondered if he had been thinking about the same thing but he never asked. “We should dance,” he said, “do you want to dance.” 

It wasn’t really a question. But Remus said, “Alright.” At first they tried like a funny adapted version of the rhythmic stepping waltzy dancing they’d learned for the Yule Ball fifth year except they had both learned to lead, so they switched off, and they spun each other to the sound of it when the guitar did that thing, and at the end of it they were both sort of out of breath, but Sirius started the song again. And then again and then again until it must have been two or three AM because they could hear the drunks shouting in the streets when the bars closed, and it had stopped raining, and they had thrown open all the windows and turned off all the lights, and they weren’t so much dancing as leaning against each other and swaying. Their heartbeats were not synchronous but something about it was orchestral and symphonic as though conducted, and whatever was strung up between them was tight and close. It was so much bigger than himself he was sinking inside it. “There’s just a few like you so young and real…” 

\--

He did not know how long it had been — he was still breaststroking — when he went to kick and his knee scraped stone. He stopped and stood so numb with cold he couldn’t feel his leg bleeding nor the salt sting in the shallow wound. It was June and atop the cliff he could see, God, the green, the green, the grass and the trees in full flower, so much vibrant searing color he had forgotten the taste of, but the chill of the early day was frigid against his wet skin. He waded out of the water like a sea captain returning bereft and naked from shipwreck balancing nervously upon the stones and at the tiny seaweedy wedge of beach indeed he knelt and pressed his hands deep into the warming sand and kissed the earth. The washed-up kelp buzzed with sea lice and overhead the birds wheeled and cawed and with the gentle breeze in the far trees Remus thought of life life life life God here was life and he must have truly come back from death because shoving down on his shoulders he felt the blissful weight of all of it and it was very nearly too much to bear. His heart was slamming in his chest and each breath felt like twenty knives through his lungs and he could feel as though by rubber bands the sickly and brutalized animal that remained of his mind pulling itself together from where it had been cast. He sat in the sand and hugged his knees and squeezed his toes until he could feel them again and then he stood and walked in the shadows down the beach seeking a route up the cliff — seeking to be rid of the inexorable sound of the sea echoing in his skull, in his very soul, for the first time in twelve years. That was the end, but it was also the beginning. 


	10. Chapter 10

** Hogwarts  
** _ June 1993 _

The pounding on the door to Sirius’s rooms began about an hour past dawn. It continued until he roused himself, shouted something at it, and managed to put his dressing gown on and feel his way across the room half-asleep. Since the year he had spent in Oxford working through the night and sleeping all day he had rather not been able to summon any kind of productivity, politeness, or motivation before eight AM. 

Of course it was Dumbledore, who was white-faced and harried, red-eyed, unslept. “I need you in my office immediately.” 

“What for?” 

“Something’s happened.” 

Sirius's heart plummeted into his stomach. “Is it Harry?” 

“Not yet. We’ve dispatched an MLE squad to Surrey.”

“Not _yet_?” 

“Sirius, I don’t feel like telling this story twenty times so I will be telling it once in my office in fifteen minutes to all the summer staff and faculty and I need you present, do you understand?” 

“Has You Know Who come back?” 

“Sirius — not _yet_. My office, fifteen minutes.” 

Then he stormed off. 

Hurriedly Sirius dressed. It was a bad month but necessaries were necessaries so he blew all the magic he would likely be able to use that day boiling water for coffee, which he poured into a Muggle thermos. Then he ran through the halls to Dumbledore’s suite, where half the staff who had remained on campus for the summer had already gathered. He sat between Pomona and Minerva who were tight-lipped and tired-looking and tried to drink as much of the coffee as he could without scorching his mouth in order to be fully functioning when Dumbledore launched into whatever speech regarding the situation at hand. When the man himself swept into his office with the whirling of his cloak the gathered staff quieted, watching him as he navigated the packed room and sat, slowly, tiredly, behind his desk. 

“Remus Lupin has escaped from Azkaban.” 

Gathered stunned silence. Sirius entertained for a moment that perhaps he was dreaming. 

“It’s impossible,” said Minerva at last. “It’s never been done — the facility’s been open for centuries and it’s never been done.” 

“Well it has been done now, I assure you.” 

“He’ll’ve drowned — how could he have swum to the mainland?” 

“MLE squads from as far as Cork are currently combing the channel and the Scottish coast,” Dumbledore said. “A squadron has been dispatched to Harry Potter’s neighborhood in Surrey and another has been dispatched here.” 

“Why here?” 

“The — staff of Azkaban have reported to me, he has been talking in his sleep, _he’s at Hogwarts, he’s at Hogwarts_.” 

Sirius felt a cold strange thrill — like rain down the back of his neck. Dumbledore looked right at him; so did Minerva. “How did it happen,” said Sirius, slowly, nervously, measuring words; “How exactly and why just now?” 

All the staff had turned to look at him now. He thought of Pomona: _They know you two were friends at school_. But of course Dumbledore knew the whole of it. Sirius could tell now he was weighing with the truth, and whether to tell the truth, and which of the truths to tell. Finally he said, “Mr. Lupin has been part of a new potions trial.” 

“A what?” 

“Ahh,” said Sanderson, “Wolfsbane, yes? Severus was — ” 

He silenced at a look from Dumbledore, who went on. “It’s a potion that allows werewolves to keep their human consciousness in their transformation. Mr. Lupin underwent six trials of different iterations of the potion and the last few courses have been successful.” 

Horror, ever mounting, just at the invocation of Snape’s name, and at the sound of a word like _underwent._ The submission — the robbed agency inherent in that word. Had he consented? How long had the trials gone on? Was the potion safe? How had they gotten him to take it? Unbidden his mind filled with imaginings borrowed from Muggle hospital dramas, then from his and Remus’s actual hospital drama of January 1979 — the cords in him connected to the bags hung above full of strange things and they would not tell Sirius what exactly was in them — then from an old nightmare, Remus who was not, who was a shell, who couldn’t speak, who went where he was moved, who had been sucked hollow and flayed raw by that place… 

“The state of lycanthropy under Wolfsbane is rather like a wizard’s Animagus transformation. Dementors are blind, but we had not realized that they also cannot sense animals’ minds. They reported they thought he was dead. One opened the door to check — it took them several hours to even ascertain that he was truly gone.” 

“How could he have planned an escape like this in the presence of Dementors?” 

“We are not sure that he did plan it. He simply could have seized an opportunity.” 

Sirius realized something through the fog of unbelief. “Who all gave him the potion courses? And I’m assuming someone supervised — if Dementors are blind.” 

“Myself,” said Dumbledore unsurprisingly, “and a multi-departmental task force from the Ministry.” 

Minerva caught Sirius’s gist. “Did you all have Patronuses with you?” 

In the sudden stillness Dumbledore did not answer. Sirius remembered his fevered wish, circa November 1981 — to sweep all the fancy and strange trinkets and baubles off his desk and onto the floor. 

“That would do it,” said Minerva softly. “Clear his mind. And if Dementors couldn’t sense him as a wolf it stands to reason they wouldn’t effect him, would they?” 

Utter silence. Dumbledore did not like being told he had done something wrong, and indeed he was rarely wrong. But on the few occasions when he was it seemed he took criticism best from Minerva. Sirius bit his tongue, then the inside of his lower lip, until he could taste it bleeding. “You’re certain he’s after Harry,” he said finally. 

“The child who destroyed his — his master’s master, yes, it certainly seems so,” Dumbledore said. Sirius was thankful possibly for the first time for the dearth of magic because if he had overmuch certainly by now he would have perhaps exploded, or otherwise killed someone, or otherwise actually dueled Dumbledore, which of course he had memorably attempted once before under similar emotional strain. “He is after Harry,” Dumbledore continued, “or otherwise he is after you, Sirius, as the last of his _friends_ he has not yet killed.” 

Minerva tightly grasped Sirius’s wrist before he could uselessly go for his wand in his pocket. “What are we to do,” she said. Her grip was viselike and it pressed close against his slamming pulse. 

“I want every secret passageway into and out of here closed. Sirius, you should be able to help with that. We should look into all the old defenses we can muster. There are some old wards against part-humans that perhaps we should speak to the board about reinvoking.” 

“Why were they ever taken down?” Sanderson asked. 

“There was pressure in the sixties.” And, Sirius realized, they had been kept down for Remus. “Harry Potter and his family will be watched over by incognito MLE squads twenty four hours a day. So will we be, here at Hogwarts. Fudge wants to send a contingent of Dementors once the school year starts…” 

“We cannot have Dementors here,” said Pomona. 

“That’s what I have been saying. I do believe he is influencing the board as we speak. We may have to deal with pressure from them on the subject before the summer is out. The MLE squads currently combing the Scottish coast and the North Sea are accompanied by Dementors who have been instructed to administer the kiss on sight.” 

So help him Sirius shivered. Minerva clasped his wrist still tighter. 

“You are all dismissed,” Dumbledore said. “Let us begin fortifying this castle immediately so it may be safe by the time our students return.” When they all rose to file out he continued — “Sirius, would you stay behind with me for just a moment.” 

Where Minerva had been holding his wrist she had left a red imprint of her narrow hand. “Sir?” said Sirius. The door closed behind the last of the staff. When Dumbledore looked up at him from over the gold wire rim of his bifocals Sirius thought he looked very old. 

“Mr. Black. I know you will come to me if — you receive any correspondence out of the ordinary.” 

Of course he should have known he would be kept behind for this. 

“I know it has been difficult for you to swallow the fact of Remus’s guilt but it is a fact plain and simple. He is now the most dangerous man who has been at large since the days of the war. He is out to finish what he started and I am certain he believes if he manages it he will smooth a path for Voldemort’s return. Which of course may be true.” 

“You’ve — you were there with him and you spoke — ”

“Yes, if it can be called speaking. There is not much human left to him anymore.” 

It was not surprising but still it was a blow. He had been so — in Sirius’s arms — 

He sat heavily and distantly he wondered if it was the same chair — the same chair from 1981. 

“I do not doubt he will attempt to come here and I want to — desperately I need to trust you, Sirius.” 

“You can,” Sirius said. He was not even sure if he could trust himself. “You can — you can trust me.” 

“Are you certain?” 

“I haven’t — do you think I can forgive him for what he did?” 

“He forgave you. All those years ago.” 

“Or perhaps he didn’t.” 

Dumbledore paused and regarded Sirius through his tented fingers. Finally he said, “Good.” 

\--

Sirius practically ran back to his rooms and began composing a letter to Harry. When the owl came to the window with the Prophet he nearly had a heart attack but the front page headline simply read _LONDON TEMPERATURES AT RECORD HIGH FOR THIRD STRAIGHT DAY_. “A disaster for my Flavor of the Week,” Florian Fortescue was quoted as saying; didn’t he have air conditioning? Sirius had begun trusting Harry with rather sensitive information rather recently after he, age twelve, had driven a basilisk fang through a diary that was almost certainly a Horcrux, thus proving both his mettle and his qualifications to know certain relevant facts. He wondered for a second how much Dumbledore would think it appropriate for him to disclose and then said, aloud, “Fuck it.” He wrote: 

_Harry — I wanted to tell you this sooner rather than later because it isn’t even in the Prophet yet but I’m worried about something. Do you remember I told you about me and your dad’s friend from school, Remus, who went a bit dark toward the end of the war, in the early ‘80s?_

A bit dark, as though Remus had simply started listening to more Throbbing Gristle than the rest of them.

_He was in Azkaban, the wizarding prison, which is located on an island in the North Sea and is extremely secure, but somehow he just escaped which has never been done before and now he’s on the loose. It just happened this morning and his wand was snapped when he was arrested so he can’t Apparate and as such I bet he’s still in Scotland where probably they’ll catch him before too long. Dumbledore’s told me there’s an MLE unit in your neighborhood (so if you see any square-headed piggish types wandering about with wands exuding a bunch of ward spells, that’s why) so there’s no need to be scared, but I wanted you to hear it from me. I’m sure if they don’t catch him within twenty-four hours it’ll be in tomorrow’s Prophet and then maybe even on the Muggle TV news. If it is, can you owl me? We don’t get any of that stuff here and I’d be curious about how they’re reporting it._

_Happy to answer any questions you may have on this subject. Please keep me posted if you hear or see anything strange. Remus probably looks different now than when I knew him but he’s very tall, and he has a big scar diagonal across his face (for a while he fought against V with me and your da and he got mauled by a werewolf)._

_Yours sincerely, your friend Sirius_

Before he could regret it he rolled up the parchment and tied it to his owl’s leg and shoved her out the window. 

\--

The next day, Remus’s squinting and dazed 1981 mugshot covered the full first page of the _Prophet._ Harry’s return letter arrived moments after the paper did. 

_Sorry Sirius the Muggles had a Family Entanglement yesterday and I didn’t see your letter til I was heading to sleep. I did see the MLE folks around the neighborhood, thanks for clueing me in as I had wondered. Looks like as per the Prophet this morning they haven’t caught Remus Lupin yet. I tried to do some sleuthing on the Dursleys TV this morning and they had the news on but I didn’t hear anything. I’ll let you know if I do or if I hear anything else._

_Do you think he means to hurt either of us? Why?_

_Talk soon — let’s keep each other posted._

_Harry_

\--

All that summer he didn’t sleep, rather he paced, and by mid-July Harry reported that they were talking about Remus on the Muggle news. _They said he’s mad and extremely dangerous and he has a gun_. Sirius could not help but remember Remus’s lengthy fourth year Muggle studies research paper on Muggle gun violence which he presented to the bored and sleepy class with moving diagrams. Dumbledore was infrequently on the Hogwarts premises those days and when he was he was holed up in his office holding assorted meetings Sirius was never invited to. Yet on a brutally hot night in August Dumbledore came to Sirius’s rooms and under the guise of small talk peeked (likely he thought surreptitiously) in all of Sirius’s closets and even in his trunk. Sirius had drunk so much coffee his piss looked like turmeric tea and he spent much of his time smoking cigarettes, making notes for what would end up being, early in 1995, the most esoteric book of his academic career ( _Treatise on Magic as Performed by Muggles_ ), and listening loudly to Talking Heads’ _Remain in Light_ , which Remus had had on the record player at the Chalk Farm flat for all of 1981, as though it would somehow clue him in to Remus’s activities or whereabouts. Really it was probably just making him paranoid as it uniquely captured that precise feeling of wartime anxiety. “Isn’t it weird — looks too obscure to me — wasting away — that was their policy…” 

“Many students are pulling out of Hogwarts at least for this year,” said Dumbledore, peeking behind a curtain. “Don’t you know any air conditioning spells?” 

Sirius looked at him and shrugged. He was too tired to fake politeness. Summers, he had realized over the twelve years he had lived with fluctuating magic ability, were almost always bad. Winters were iffy and Autumns and Springs were screamingly overwrought with few exceptions. 

“I can’t hold off Fudge any longer,” Dumbledore continued. “He’s sending Dementors — a contingent from Azkaban. They’re not to enter the castle but they will be on the Hogwarts Express and they will establish a perimeter.” 

Sirius had been in the presence of one Dementor, ever, on a routine visit to the Ministry in 1983. “How is the board justifying this.” 

“Student safety; they’re saying they’ve been lobbied by parents.” 

“Meaning they’ve been lobbied by Lucius and Narcissa.” 

Dumbledore fixed Sirius with a look but he didn’t disagree. 

“How are we supposed to teach with them sucking like they do.” 

“They’ll be around the grounds — a perimeter, like I said. They are disallowed from the castle and from any out-of-castle academic or extracurricular gathering areas such as Hagrid’s, the lake, or the Quidditch pitch. As no one can Apparate within the perimeter it looks like Fudge and the board will agree to that proposal.” 

Perhaps he had forgotten, though Sirius had not, that Remus had Apparated into Hogwarts in 1978. That he had done it from a fount of resonance under extreme duress didn’t mean he couldn’t attempt it again. It seemed that this proposal also didn’t take into account Portkeys, yet if it kept Dementors from his classroom Sirius couldn’t complain. His favorite song on _Remain in Light_ had come up and he listened to it instead of Dumbledore’s spiel. “For a long time I felt without style or grace — wearing shoes with no socks in cold weather.” 

Dumbledore contemplatively poked the lump of blankets at the end of Sirius’s unmade bed with his wand. “ — worry only about those of our students with more, ah, fragile constitutions,” he was finishing. 

“This is kind of a gross invasion of my privacy,” Sirius told him. “Don’t you trust me?” 

“Not particularly, Sirius; I’m sorry, but this is a trying circumstance.” He checked, finally, Sirius’s coat rack, for some reason, then he went for the door. “Is this _Remain in Light_?” 

Sirius was surprised. “I thought you were more of a chamber music kind of guy.” 

“I was partial to _Speaking in Tongues_. They have a unique ability to transcend genre, do they not?” 

Sirius was rather offended Dumbledore would even attempt small talk about Talking Heads after just combing his rooms (and certainly after this he would be headed to Sirius’s classroom) for evidence of his harboring the most dangerous fugitive in wizarding Britain. For the past month or so guiltily he had wished they would find Remus and have him kissed and then put him wherever they put the soulless husks (his mind conjured up an endless white warehouse room brilliantly lit in which cots were stacked six high with empty pale faces, eyes and mouths open and unblinking, sustained by potions on drips, lungs inflated by machinery) just so that it would be over with. Certainly it was inevitable and dragging it out seemed like a special torture, or like a fox hunt over hill and vale… 

“Goodnight then,” he said to Dumbledore, standing. He would have herded the old man out of his rooms then if it had been necessary. 

\--

Of course things went on as was relatively normal regardless of Sirius’s unsleptness and paranoia (whenever an owl came for him his hands started shaking violently; he was terrified to face the decision he would have to make if Remus did indeed contact him): Sirius corresponded with assorted dig leaders at archeological sites around Europe to set up field trips, Harry owled twice weekly, slowly and then all in a flood Sirius’s magic started to bleed back, students returned in September, Dementors arrived shortly thereafter and established a perimeter, and Riley Song came to Sirius’s office at eight AM preceding the first day of classes. “I have a problem,” she said. 

“What is it?” 

He was worried Riley would tell him she needed to drop out. She was his best and most frightening student. Twice he had struggled to wake her up from trances and once he had stuck his head in the fire to summon Dumbledore to help before she tapped his shoulder with an “I’m right here, it’s fine.” 

“Am I in class with Taylor?” 

“Of course you are; there’s only five seventh year students.” 

“I can’t be in class with Taylor,” she said. She was flushing up the neck and so help him Sirius cocked an eyebrow. “Shut up,” she said then, though he hadn’t said anything. 

“I’m no stranger to regrettable seventh year gay experiences.” 

Now it was her turn for the eyebrow. “Really?” 

“Yes and that’s all I’ll say on the subject.” He liked Riley but he didn’t feel it was fair to burden any of his students with the particulars. Plus he knew she was a gossip. 

“It’s just we went to a Sonic Youth gig this summer and then — well afterward I tried to owl her a couple times and she wouldn’t respond. And she stole my Pavement tapes which were expensive and now they’re out of print.” 

“Taylor likes Sonic Youth?” 

“Of course she does. She bought the tickets. She invited me.” 

“Well how was the gig?” 

“Not memorable as we were like, half the time, um, in the bathroom…” 

“Don’t be embarrassed,” said Sirius. “Not until you've been caught in the act by Filch in the Charms corridor broom closet.” 

“Really!” 

“It was 1977,” said Sirius. “We were listening to a lot of Brian Eno. Anyway you can’t drop out because many of our trips this year I planned just with you in mind and there is no other class so you will have to settle things with Miss Montcalm one way or the other.” 

“Her parents are racist homophobic fucks.” 

“So were mine. Besides, try and name a single Slytherin whose parents aren’t. And she isn’t a racist homophobic fuck and that’s what matters.” 

“Nothing can ever come of it,” Riley said; tears had sprung to her eyes and she turned to the window. “Nothing can ever come of it and I hate it and I can’t see her.” 

Something about the seventh year magical theory class fomented romantic drama with foolproof aplomb. Perhaps it was just the sensual nature of probing deeply into the innate truths of one’s being alongside a cohort of fellow twisted geniuses. Usually said romantic drama was disappointingly heterosexual but occasionally two very competitive students of the same gender sprouted a semi-erotic rivalry. Sirius had not expected it from Riley and Taylor, as Riley was too frequently stoned to be all that competitive and besides they each had such a different feel for resonance that their work was completely incomparable, though equally good. 

“Riley,” Sirius said, choosing his words with care. He had never before seen her so emotional. “Is there any chance this could be a big misunderstanding between you two? Like perhaps she feels, maybe she didn’t answer your owls because she thought — ” 

“She used me,” Riley said wetly; “She found out about me and Linda Esteves and she — she used me to see if she would like it at all with another girl but I guess she didn’t which is really too bad because I really liked her.” 

Linda Esteves was another Slytherin, a favorite of Minerva’s, who all the faculty expected would go on to herself teach Transfiguration or write theory. She had already had a paper on the ethics of the transfiguration of animals into inanimate objects (and vice versa) published in _Metamorphosis Quarterly_. “Perhaps if you want some more meaningful connection you should stop dating Slytherins,” Sirius suggested. 

“All my friends told me the same thing but — you can’t just pick who to fall in love with.” She pressed at the wet dark circles under her eyes with the grubby and torn sleeve of her robe. “You have to take them with their faults. It just — there’s its own kind of magic in it, isn’t there? And it’s bigger than you, and it weighs a thousand pounds, and you don’t ask for it, it just is.” 

Sirius thought he should tell her probably he was the last person she needed to tell this to, but he bit his lip, and as such she kept going. 

“It feels like that other person in the room with you sometimes. When you get way down into it and you can almost see them. And it’s not that they’re that person. But there’s a shadow of them in that person — there’s a shadow of them like, in the very core of your own self, and — ”

“Riley,” said Sirius. “I am the last person you need to tell this to.” 

“Oh,” she said, “Professor Black, who — ”

“Maybe you should do your project about instinctual magic and love,” Sirius said, vaguely hating himself. If he had to workshop Riley’s theorems along these lines for an entire year he would probably have to stock up on scotch. “Unless of course you already have a concept.” 

“I was thinking about that,” Riley said; her face had brightened but her eyes were still red. “Magic and love, love as magic, magic as love, et cetera; I was thinking that or some kind of trial-based thing, like, going way deep, trying to map it…” 

He would also have to stock up on scotch if she did that. “Both are, um, exciting, Riley…” 

“Will you just tell me — ” She daubed her eyes again and he saw her work a little very practiced wandless magic to rid them of their redness. “How did your, your seventh year fling, how did it end?” 

“Oh, God, I thought I said I wasn’t going to tell you anything else.” 

“I just want to know what to start expecting.” 

We lived together for three years and I loved him and I still love him and his shadow is in the very core of my own self; currently he wanders this very countryside attending to crossroads like whatever Cerberus hellhound apparition endemic to this mythology… 

“After we graduated we were together awhile. It ended — worse than badly, you know, it was the war.” 

“Is he dead?” Riley asked, whispering as though she feared she would wake something up if she spoke too loudly, and Sirius shook his head, but he wasn’t sure if it was the truth. 

\--

He went out that night for a walk around the grounds after dinner feeling wild with the overflow of magic and the residual energy of the chalk horse he had visited with his fifth year class that morning and the memory of Riley’s weeping and her questions. He hadn’t seen Harry yet but for a split second at the previous night’s welcoming feast and it vaguely worried him along with everything else. Even the quiet beauty of the Scottish sunset seemed to portend blood. He wondered where Remus was and he wondered if he had enough strength and if he went to a place with enough strength if he could reach in through the earth and feel where Remus was. He made himself a mental note to read the relevant terramancy journals, which he had always found a sight too esoteric even for his tastes. Finally he got into thinking again about the treatise on Muggle performances of magic, which he had begun conceptualizing during the most brutal of his humid summer hangovers. He had recalled whilst holding a bag of ice to the back of his neck a story he’d once seen in the Muggle news about a young father of average build lifting a fucking car to rescue a child who had crawled under it, and had wondered why he, a wizard, couldn’t muster enough energy to cast the anti-nausea spell he’d learned at age six after having eaten too many Chocolate Frogs. 

At last he started considering if perhaps he was drinking too much. He decided perhaps he was but lately pot had started making him paranoid and he had long since given up psychedelics for a not-dissimilar reason. Everybody wanted to escape their mind sometimes, he reasoned; his mind could be particularly unfriendly, or strange or busy, busy perhaps the best way to put it, busy with things — busy with a million different songs playing all at once, and memory like a deck of cards dealt portentously, and an epic compendium of students’ names including those he didn’t need to remember anymore, and an unnecessarily detailed file labeled Horrible Things I Saw As An Auror, and a second unnecessarily detailed file labeled All the Great and Terrible Sex I Had With An Evil Traitor. And then there was a folder labeled simply DOUBT. The worst folder of them all, he sometimes thought, and certainly the most damning. Much of it was wordless — flashes of moments of things. Remus looking down the beach at Margate before he reached to clasp Sirius’s hand. When Remus woke up in the hospital, and Sirius could feel his haunting, but he could not name it. When Remus woke up the first time not knowing where he was with the pale green eyes unseeing and two of the nurses had hastened to push Sirius back from the bed while the rest held him down to keep him from ripping out his stitches which were black black black and they were all over like — like railroad treads from the sky. His skin like a landscape polluted and ruined. It was better of course than the blood of which there at first had been a lot. Sirius had always imagined Dumbledore had brought Remus into St. Mungo’s wrapped in a sheet in some grotesque pieta. Of course just before he found out he had been in Brixton doing what little investigation needed to be done before a crew came into the tenement beneath the Dark Mark to clean up the corpses of a Wizarding family, Moroccan immigrants, who had been killed in their beds. 

He was so preoccupied that he didn’t realize something about his thoughts suddenly sliding down into that sucking viscous all-seeing all-swallowing black pool might have a degree of outside influence.

He was waiting by the door of the hospital wing, 1976 — he sat by Remus’s cot and held his hand, the hand speaks, running cords, cords full of mysteries, Remus of course who was never the same after this, who was possessed after this, like a haunted house, by a fever. He lay in bed at the Hotel Rome and he couldn’t stop crying. He wished he could weep it all out from inside himself. It was like the worst beating he had ever taken. His ears were ringing and the moon was coming in a delicate white rime like ice across the floor. We cannot be sure he will survive. “I’m changing my shape — I feel like an accident — they’re back — to explain the experience — ” The first time his magic went away, and he paced the floor, and finally he lay on the cold tile, and he felt the complete and utter hollow emptiness, inside he was ringing like a bell, inside it was vacant, and way down deep inside the vacancy there was another — 

The un-voice, compulsion, tugging at all the dark matter of his soul, and he realized. Something snapped or broke like a twig or a bone and it was only when he took a breath he realized that inside the cold constriction of it he hadn’t been able to for a few moments. When he opened his eyes — he had not realized they were closed — he had never seen his Patronus so large or so nearly solid and its hackles were up and it snarled and in the sleek blue light of it he saw five of them, the inchoate crepe-paper tendrilness of them, black hole un-self, driven away from the man and the dog like a school of silent jellyfish. 

\--

He practically ran back to the castle with the Patronus pursuing and up the stairs and into his office where he struggled to lock each of the three bolts because his hands were shaking so badly. The dog sat on its haunches and eyed him confusedly and finally it put its tongue out and seemed to smile. It was so solid and so real it looked like a strange polar bear or a silvery albino husky. “Good dog,” Sirius told it. He simply bade it away and it went. His breathing and his heart rate had not yet slowed and as such he went to his desk drawer to pour himself a few fingers of scotch but he remembered his previous internal conundrum and decided to forgo it. Instead he opened all the windows wide for fresh air and tried to pinpoint the exact feeling — like a drain, but almost opposite; like a thick rubber stopper preventing compartmentalization. The tugging and the tugging of all the worst horror to the surface of oneself. That must have been the feeling of being in Azkaban… 

The timid knock on the door he didn’t register for a little while but when he went to answer it he found of course it was Harry who had stuck just his tousled head out from under his invisibility cloak. Sirius ushered him in. “How did you do that?” Harry asked. 

“How did I do what?” 

“We all saw you from the Astronomy tower and there were five of those things.” 

“They’re very hungry,” Sirius explained. Probably it wasn’t prudent to ask what Harry and company had been doing in the Astronomy tower after dinner on the first day of school. “They eat souls, piece by piece or sometimes all at once, and I suppose being here is simply too tempting. They’re not supposed to interact with us at all. But it’s probably like someone’s put out a big feast in front of them and told them not to eat it and just to wait until a bony scrap of nothing might show up at the end.” 

“They came in our cabin on the train,” Harry said. “I, um, fainted.” 

“Yes well, I’m not surprised, I almost did just then.” 

“None of the rest of them — ”

“Harry, probably all your friends’ worst memories are like, their childhood pets dying, not that those aren’t legitimate, but they pale in comparison to yours or mine for that matter.” 

“But you chased them away, with that ghost.” 

“It’s not quite a ghost. It’s called a Patronus, it’s like a sort of protector animal, and it can keep you safe from a lot of Dark things. It can carry messages for you, too. Our Defense teacher called it ‘the weaponized edge of your soul.’ It’s on the standard Defense curriculum for fifth year.” 

Harry fixed him with a look which was very Lily. Lily when someone had made kind of a sexist comment. “I’m only third year.” 

“Well — ah.” Sirius realized the issue at hand. “Who’s the Defense professor this year?” 

“Shacklebolt’s his name. I haven’t had him yet and he wasn’t at the welcome feast.” 

“Kingsley,” Sirius said, “yes, we were in school together. He was in the Auror department and I’m guessing he probably still is. Last I heard he was a case leader on the bigger issues… like, tracking down the last few of Voldemort’s Death Eaters and the like.” 

“Do you think he’s here because of Lupin?” 

“I wouldn’t doubt it. He would certainly teach you the Patronus spell if you’d like to learn it this year.” 

Harry looked toward the open window as if trying to glean the creatures from the darkness. “I don't want him to teach me,” he said. It was rare he sounded at all petulant but it had crept into his voice. “Can’t you teach me?” 

“I told you my magic can be a bit iffy…” 

“It didn’t _look_ iffy.” 

“A Patronus isn’t usually so solid,” Sirius explained. “I have a lot too much, at least right now, so everything’s bigger and brighter, and come winter I probably won’t be able to make a corporeal one…” 

“What’s that mean?” 

“One with a form, like a body — you saw it; it looks like a dog.” 

“I thought it was a bear.” 

“No. Sometimes it’s just a vaguely doglike mist.” 

That made Harry laugh, which always heartened Sirius, much as it had heartened him to make James laugh, much as it had heartened him to make Remus laugh. 

“I suppose I can teach you,” Sirius said finally. “There will only be some demonstration required. Probably if I can’t do it we can ask Kingsley to come help. I’m sure we could probably just find a boggart…” 

“Hermione said she thinks there’s one in the old keybox in the Gryffindor girls’ dormitories.” 

“I can send one of my students. Don’t try to go up there; you’ll bang your head up pretty good.” But Harry’s somber face indicated he had already tried and learned that for himself. “Something you should do before our first meeting on this subject is try to think of your best memories. Dementors will pull bad memories into the forefront of your mind so it has to be something you can hang onto even under duress. Your Patronus will use this memory to come to life. So it has to be strong. You should brainstorm — and then we can meet, maybe Thursday nights, does that work for you? I’ll talk to Kingsley…” 

“What’s your memory that you use?” Harry asked. 

“Well sometimes I remember when I learned Voldemort was gone before I knew any of the particulars. Or, the day I moved into my first flat after graduation… ” Then lots of things he couldn’t tell Harry. Remus’s face when he had seen their Animagi for the first time. The day Remus had gotten out of the hospital, and Sirius had gotten home, and he had been listening to Wire at the sink washing the mountains of dishes by hand. The song that was playing was “Used To.” Later he found this disappointingly portentous. “Does the pain remain when the head is turned and the body walks away?” At the time it seemed like a pastoral painted by Vermeer or something for the way the sunset light was coming in through the far windows, and Remus had just gotten out of the bath and he was very stoned, and he smelled clean and almost like himself, not like blood or potions for the first time in months, and Sirius had undressed him very carefully, carefully carefully because he had taken his bandages off and the scabs were soft and red, thick and marbled like runs of color in pale stone, and sucked him off against the fridge. Of course this was the beginning of the end and appropriately in thinking of this moment he always remembered the next song on the Wire LP which was “Too Late:” “Is it too late to change my mind?” Anyway to Harry he said, “Another one I used to use especially in school was when I got sorted into Gryffindor. Or the first time we won the Quidditch Cup. What about the moment you found out you were a wizard?” 

His own he always thought was less edifying but then he didn’t remember it and simply it was a story his mother had often told to polite company in order to solicit tactful tittering. It was something that had always intrigued him. Plenty of Muggle-born witches and wizards had grown up thinking sometimes strange things just happened when they were around. But he had known it before he knew anything else — some of his earliest memories constituted prodding spiders until they embiggened grotesquely, simply to terrify his brother. “You were an asshole kid,” James had always said. He suspected he had been and worried he was still. 

They brainstormed a while longer and then he walked Harry to the door and checked the hallway as Harry decked himself in his invisibility cloak. For a moment he was just a floating head. Sometimes this stuff was so nostalgia-inducing it was like a punch in the face. “Goodnight,” he said to the nothing. “Goodnight,” it said back. 


	11. Chapter 11

** Scottish Highlands  
** _ September 1993 _

There was so much color and so many words and sounds at first Remus could not stand it. The smell of the earth and the grass and the rain and the stone and the woods, and the sun-warmed soil, and the way the water tasted, and the way food tasted, stolen from dumpsters behind Muggle supermarkets and he would puke it back up practically immediately but then he would keep eating because the taste — the salt and sugar, sour soft fruit, bitter, and the juice that burst against the back of his throat, and the way bread felt in his hands, and the yeast smell vivid like a lager, and cheese, cheese melted stringy in the heat soft and stretching and he ate it all even the cloudy mold — and eventually there was nothing left inside him, not even acid. His stomach twisted like a wrung sponge. He walked off the coast in the night and slept in the day and the remembering hit him like a boxer such that once he fell to his knees because it weighed a thousand pounds. He was too vigilant to sleep as he knew there were several parties who pursued him but sometimes he lost consciousness in his exhaustion and from the darkness he woke at dusk curled up so tightly in the leaf loam his bones ached. Each time he came to he was possessed by a rabid creature fear that he would open his eyes unto some other place whose dregs remained in him like last tea leaves. 

He walked, he walked, he walked, he remembered. He was shaky with hunger and pieces of his mind felt still atomized. Reduced to rubble — to a fine white ritual ash. Places he dared not tread. Sometimes they grew back like miraculous limbs and in the fine driving rain he did not realize he was weeping. Still he felt the dark thing he was certain ever stalked him. As though he had stolen a favor out of death, which he thought perhaps he had. He remembered: His mother was listening to Patsy Cline. “I’m always walkin after midnight searchin for you…” Upstairs he was in bed and he couldn’t sleep for the pain. On better days she would whistle but she wasn’t whistling now. When she came up she had made finger sandwiches and scones with clotted cream and last summer’s quince jam and she had them all upon fine bone china because when the thing had happened she had packed up her ancestral silver in a box with hay and she had brought it up to the attic where it collected dust with select of Remus’s father’s old medals and cups accrued at dueling championships just post-Hogwarts (“back in the day when a man could make his living with a bit of nimble spellwork,” he always said, patting his belly which by then was overlarge), and with some haunted things which rattled on occasion in the night, but Remus was accustomed to them, and when he was younger he had given them names, and he had suspected they appeared in his dreams, but then he himself had become something altogether more frightening, and as such now they were rather quiet. “Honey,” she said. She had gotten these lines in the corners of her eyes having developed there rapidly like a polaroid photograph and her mouth was creased and red and her lips were getting thinner by the month. She put cream and jam on a scone for him and pressed it into his outstretched bandaged hand. She had a book of Yeats: “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree…” 

Sirius, who had been touched by Remus’s parents’ West Country accents and taste in ‘50s records from America, had taken it upon himself to take care of Remus after the moon beginning in 1974, which meant he would put the Stones on and nick snacks from the kitchens. He was not so much partial to poetry but sometimes he would read some Brautigan aloud, when he had first smoked pot (before any of the rest of them, to James’s chagrin) and was assuming a humorous bourgeois attempt at the Beat lifestyle: “For fear you will be alone you do so many things that aren’t you at all.” Sirius said Brautigan’s suicide note had just read, sorry for the mess. Then he didn’t say anything for a while. Sometimes Remus thought Sirius was the one among them who had certainly been raised by wolves, for all his table manners were fastidious. His mother had put a Stinging Hex on his hand when he’d gone for the wrong fork, he explained, laughing, but they didn’t laugh; their mothers had made them scones with clotted cream. Their mothers were mothers. Sirius’s mother was like a sharp shard of Black glass — like a crow at dawn. 

The alike thing about them — and he had picked up on this even before — was their rejection of their blood. Their disowning. He would drain it all if he could. Sorry for the mess! They hated it so much it made them both sick. Sick in different ways but sick nonetheless. And they both feared most at their hearts what about it was inescapable. What inheritances would have to be enacted before too long. 

In the hallway after Charms — Remus had Television stuck in his head. “How’s a snake — get outta skin…” Sirius had procured rather a lot of pot he’d flashed to Remus just before class (it was in a baggie in the buttoned breast pocket of his t-shirt) and as such they went together to the kitchens to gather the necessary supplies beforehand. “Have you got rollies,” Remus asked; he was perpetually the only one of them who was concerned with particulars. “Of course I’ve got rollies,” said Sirius. They went to the kitchens and then back to the dormitory weighted down thoroughly with sweets of every conceivable variety and with greasy chips and crisps and pretzels and yet after all this of course James and Peter were in the library. The two of them alone remained in Muggle Studies and they had a test that Monday on Muggle literature for which of course neither of them had yet done the reading which constituted several hundred pages many of which were by James Joyce. Nothing remained but for Remus and Sirius to smoke the pot and eat the snacks themselves whilst listening to Wire’s _Pink Flag_ which was Sirius’s favorite record at the time. Remus had never heard it stoned so he had never heard it the most it could be and sometimes he had to close his eyes. Whenever he opened them Sirius was air-drumming. You fucking piece of shit, he thought, fondly. It was a creepy record, and sort of apocalyptic in its politics, but it was very brash and punk and loud, and it felt very real, because it felt like then, and it felt like _them_ , and so he reached forward across the space between them strewn with crisp baggies and grasped Sirius’s knee. He had really just meant to do it to communicate that they were together living in this world with not dissimilar baggage, that they were in the same world listening to the same thing, this sort of disturbingly probable Muggle prophesy, and all his sort of twisted gratitude that he wasn’t alone in either regard, but something changed and moved like clouds off Sirius’s face, like a raw golden dawning, like the sacred wash of sunrise over the full moon morning, and he pulled Remus forward bodily and kissed him. “The time is too short but never too long to reach ahead — to project the image — which will in time become a concrete dream…” At the time Remus was supposed to be Exclusive with Fenwick but all that was out the window in under four seconds which was probably equivalent to the length of time in which Sirius got him out of his clothes, despite the fact they were both very stoned. 

Later in London he had the Clash on the stereo, or else Bauhaus or Devo and sometimes X. Sirius spent a lot of time trying to sand down all the newer sharper edges Remus had grown in Brittany and the weeks after, and Remus just kept growing more. He smoked joints on the couch against the lingering hurts and listened to Gang of Four: “Your relations are of power; we all have good intentions but all with strings attached…” They slept with their backs to each other but pressed close because the bed was small and the mattress lumpy and in the winter they were always cold because the heat was so finnicky. Sometimes he could leach warmth from the antique iron heater in a kind of delicate operation learned from his parents in the cottage in Castle Cary; Sirius with his aristocratic upbringing was typically clueless on any and all homemaking subjects. “You can just tell me if I’m doing something you don’t like,” he said, it was very late, and outside it the sky was a deep blood-red with the heavy cloud cover catching all the light, holding it down; “you don’t have to lie there like a cold fish.” Remus pretended he was sleeping. I like everything you do to me; he couldn’t say, sometimes you make me feel like I’m going to die of pleasure… The problem was it seemed lately he’d been recruited into the Order only for questionably successful attempts at sexual espionage. “Your kiss so sweet — your sweat so sour…” He could feel Sirius wanted to ask him, _What happened_? As though he did not already know, as though he could not tell, as though Remus could say. 

Where were these words when he had had ink with which to mark himself? They had been snatched up — eaten up. He had taken them back bodily from the very belly of the beast. It was the only triumph he could summon when he feared he had gone mad, which was customary. He suspected he _was_ mad and he feared he would never get it all back and most of all he feared that there was still a part of him which at every moment of every hour of every day repeated over and over on endless thrall like the forgotten refracted echo of an AM radio band from the fucking abyss, _you will never kill your master, you will never kill the rat, you will never kill your master, you will never kill the rat kill the rat kill the rat kill the rat rat rat rat rat_

_Et libertas mea,_ he thought, while he lay in the heavy leaf loam, and he was so tired he was dreaming a little with his eyes open, but yet he could not bring himself to close them. _Et libertas mea, relinuquo servitutem;_ after all you could be pledged in unwitting fealty to more than one master, and fear was one of them, and madness was another; love, he thought, which he could almost remember, was a third. Ian Curtis, 1979: “Someone take these dreams away…” When he closed his eyes at last and slipped to the very bottom of the fear he could feel that something about it was residual like a slick of slime or blood. Something primed like a bomb to germinate and flower. They had not taken all of his soul but they had done second best — as though he needed another Dark contagion besides the obvious. 

\--

In August fear pursued him back in his tracks across the East lands ever toward the sea. Sometimes whatever bruised fruit remained of his conscious mind would surface and he would remember to be afraid, and he would understand they were routing him out like a chased fox ever toward the MLE squadron headquartered at Fraserburgh where they would lay him down in ceremonial consummation and press the cold netherworld vacuum of their lips to his. Otherwise that other simpler mind had assumed his again but it was intelligent and conniving and it understood fear differently and so he listened when it told him to run, and where and how to do it. They followed him at night when the stuff of them was indistinguishable from the fog and the sky and so he walked in the day, which he had not heretofore dared, and when the sun was at its highest he rested for an hour or two and then he moved on again. When the sun had fully set he started running and he could feel them not far behind him after not so very long. They glided across the ground and they were silent and here so far loosed from the place that birthed and sustained them they were stretched thin and vengeful for it. Even when he could not see them he could tell they were starving and when he distinguished them in the darkness far behind or below in the vivid grey-green vales the crepe-paper stuff of them seemed sheer and pale. 

He doubled around the hills where he could heading ever inland and sometimes he lost them for hours and even once for days but now they had his trail and they knew the state of him they would not be put off. They split up and contingents pursued him from the West and the South. He remembered, late in 1980, Sirius had been in the battle near Leeds where Fenwick and MacDonald and a few others had died and afterward — in grievous and apocalyptic defeat — the survivors had had to run because the Death Eaters had put up an anti-Apparition perimeter none of them had known was possible. They were pursued and the red flares of diverse hexes followed them in the thick night through the trees and they had no way of knowing where it would be safe to try and Apparate. Anyway at last they had managed and Sirius had come home from making his report at the Ministry at about 3AM; Remus was in bed but not sleeping and when the door opened in came the smell of violent ash and blood and Sirius’s shoulders were hunched together and he was shaking. “It was like sport to them,” he said, and his voice was so soft, as though it were a secret, “and we couldn’t — we couldn’t take the bodies.” Remus realized probably this was the first time Sirius understood short of a miracle they were altogether doomed. Which of course he himself had understood since December 1978. 

Again now short of a miracle he was altogether doomed. He had gained some ground on the full moon but now, three days after, he could see from a rise at dusk when the two factions came together in the valley in a seething black maelstrom. The wind so high smelled like sea and he could nearly see to the North the coast he had swum into in the end of June. He ached from running and his feet were bleeding inside his shoes and he had not been able to eat or sleep for days — he imagined them driving him into the surf the way he knew bears after prey sometimes did, but that was of course if he could make it to the coast. Rather they would run him near to death somewhere on this tarn and then they would gather around him as fear had done before to pull what was left of him apart by mouthfuls. 

Hope against hope — with the last of it he could summon — he reached beyond everything into the earth again and he thought, _help me_. 

The sudden bright flare in his chest drew him like a magnet. _East._ So he went. He scrambled off the rise and ran against the last dregs of sun and the desperate exhausted pain in his legs and lungs erased itself like chalk and his breath and heartbeat thundered in his ears in symphonic tandem and for a few minutes or maybe an hour he forgot which self he wore. Behind him to the West he felt their swarming and their quenchless hunger and yet they were a worry like having perhaps left the oven on. 

It was around midnight when he found the stone circle and he stumbled into it and bent double to catch his breath. With his eyes shut he felt the magic of that place wrap him like ivy and through him stretching the threads of what little remained of his own magic and he felt it like a kind of shivering itch in his veins, like the pins-and-needles blood and feeling rushing back to numb fingers and toes — 

_They are not the darkness that should concern you,_ said his own voice inside his own mind without his thinking it. _They are but a symptom of the larger. And unlike the larger they can be banished with only a spell._

When he stood up he saw they had gathered about the heelstone beneath the high white moon and they were very tall and in their anticipation of his soul they were almost wildly present. They were like hooded occult monastics possessed by the curse of some ancient greed and the torn ragged hems of their robes did not touch the ground. One of them was the one who wore the scapular of baubles, who had let him out of his cell to begin with. He could feel his mind changing within itself like oil floating on water. 

_Fear is not your master_ , said his own voice inside his own mind without his thinking it. _You can banish the thrall of fear without any spell at all._

He had never attempted magic so big without a wand but he was certain it could be done. He lifted his hand like an orchestra conductor and in his fingers like a twine of yarn or cobweb he held the spell and the memory that would feed it woven together tightly. They pressed toward him — they were like a whole living fog of dullness. They were like a drain on the whole world’s color. And he let the spell go — “ _Expecto patronum_.” 

It was the memory he had used to summon a Patronus since the early wartime days. He was waking up after the full moon in the Forbidden Forest, and Sirius was with him, naked, muddy, vainly picking dirt out from under his nails, and his hair was down, because he’d lost the tie he used to keep it up, and wet with dew and very dark, and he was watching at the woods for sounds with a casual un-fear, like whatever came at them — giant spider, centaur herd, dragons, vengeful unicorns — he would just look at it and it would turn around and wander back off into the brush and the fog. 

What came of it was not purely of himself but also elementally of that place, its atavistic power and its compulsion — it was almost his wolf but it was huge and brilliant russet golden and it charged them with its teeth bared. It was bright and brilliant like a pyre burning on the tarn in the night and it seemed to crackle or throw sparks from itself with its wild energy and when it snarled and yapped Remus could hear it. Its hackles were up and its head hung low between its shoulders and it was remarkably solid and when it pressed toward them and through them they did not so much scatter as they withered. The crepe-paper substance of them wavered as if between several worlds and the sound they made in their anguish was a high senseless scream like a teakettle boiling. They shivered and stretched like warm taffy and they pulled apart and then they snapped out of being with a blackened sort of anti-photographic flash. 

Then the night seemed very still. Remus’s breath was not yet caught from running. The wolf trotted back to his side and sat like a dog would and he felt the warmth of it banish what it could of the residual fear in his mind and the pain in his feet. It could do not much about the scattering floating sensation in his mind he had categorized as madness but it made it seem rather less intimidating. Nervously he pet its head — it was almost real. 

_I can show you the larger if you want to see it,_ said the voice not his voice. _They have made you instrumental in its being and as such you should understand_. 

He felt almost equal portions relief and apprehension that there was something afoot larger than himself. He had suspected it and he thought he could almost remember pieces of it but he had feared it was mostly his paranoia. “Alright,” he said, before he could think on it any further. 

_I’m coming with you. Don't be afraid._

“I’m not afraid.” It felt truer when he said it aloud. The wolf thing licked his wrist. He felt the tight squeezing unbirth feeling of Apparition stretch around him, familiar and unfamiliar, and then the circle dissolved. When he shut his eyes he could see still the bright imprint of the non-animal. 

\--

He remembered: in school he hated the thing because it reminded him of the beast in his blood that he could not kill. When he managed to summon it in the first time in fifth year Defense class it charged from his wand and then it bounded back to him and looked up at him expectantly with its bright smart eyes and even though only Sirius and James and Peter were watching and they already knew he felt as though he had outed himself to his entire class and perhaps to the entire school and that night lying awake he feared at any moment Dumbledore would burst into the dormitory with his expulsion paperwork. “You weren’t supposed to tell anyone,” he would say, “in case you don’t recall that was a condition of our agreement.” 

For many nights thereafter he had slept little and he had found an abandoned classroom and rehearsed and rehearsed until he could create a Patronus that was incorporeal. There was a wolfishness about it sometimes, like ears or teeth, or the suggestion of hackles, but it was just a mist, and so mist was what he kept casting. He took the point reduction on the Defense N.E.W.T. even though the proctors offered to give him another chance to cast a corporeal one. He wondered if it had been like this since always, like, theoretically if he could have cast a Patronus at age four, in the before time he scarcely remembered, would it have been the same? Had he always been doomed to this? Was he born, his body and his magic and his self, did he come into existence already knowing? 

In the war he found that the incorporeal mist was not enough and by that time most of the Order knew what he was and so he rehearsed again in the Chalk Farm flat and brought it back to being but still he hated it. It was powerful but it was very shy and when its deed was done it would snap back out of existence though sometimes James’s stag and Sirius’s dog and even McKinnon’s hawk and Meadowes’s bear would stay with them for hours afterward. The wolf was proof that no matter how fervently he tried he could not divorce this piece from his self. He had tried very hard to be a wizard but at the heart of his wizardry, in the wellspring in him where all his magic came from, in this place first and foremost he was a werewolf. He was Greyback’s werewolf. He would not — could not — did not — own his soul. It had possessed him as such even before Azkaban, where his self-loathing had unfocused and unfurled within their watchful presence like a camera lens or one of those tropical flowers that smelled like rotting flesh when it bloomed. 

\--

The Apparition spit him out again on the edge of another sea, ruggeder and loud, and the waning moon lit a narrow channel between the mainland’s sharp black promontories and a nearby island with a similarly uninhabited-seeming coast. The golden wolf met his eyes for a second and then it pointed its long elegant nose downcurrent to the South around the nearest ridge. He followed where it pointed and it stood so close to him he could feel its reassuring warmth and no longer was he afraid. So he had spoken the truth to it at the circle. 

“Where are we?” he whispered. 

_You know where_. 

He remembered the polaroid photographs from the dreams not his own. The graves and the blood and the torn corpses. Before that he remembered Dumbledore with his map of the safehouses and arsenals should they be caught in the field or should they find their homes compromised — “this one, in Oban, mostly out of commission — this one, yes, near Galway, primarily historical research…” And the besieged and frightened and famine-thin pack he’d met with in the Hebrides in 1980, himself as shaken and fearful as they were, who told him, we cannot ally with your Ministry; you know not what they do. Disappearances and rumors. Advertisements of employment that no one came back from. 

_It is more complex than genocide_ , said the voice, addressing Remus’s thoughts directly, _but only just_. 

Its nose was cool against the back of his hand. At the end of the promontory he peered around the ridge. In the cove was a bunker. It looked nearly like a holdover from one of the famous D-Day photographs but for a strange Dark stuff itself breathing in that place swelling in tune with the sound of the sea and swarming manifest in the mouth of the tunnel in the fragile rime of moonlight. From the shore a shoddy dock had been built and tied up at the end of it was a boat not unlike the MLE craft that brought prisoners to Azkaban — yet gathered around the gangway of it were about twenty teenagers in grey robes. They were silent and a few among them were hunched with fear and a few others stood proudly straight-backed and a few others were wringing their hands. The wolf’s resonance helped him feel that in them as in himself was that thread of wrongness. They were nearly human but not fully. Amongst them was at least one werewolf of Greyback’s, werewolves of other masters, vampires and kelpies and Veela, and one of them, miraculously, was Merfolk; she stood on two unshod human feet on the dock breathing the night air, but she was supported by another girl, and her long-fingered strange webbed hand was splayed over her chest. 

He began with a quiet dread to suspect who they awaited and indeed the man himself developed from the darkness after not so long, holding _Lumos_ at the end of his wand; it was Severus Snape. He was accompanied by a second man, tall and aristocratic in Ministry robes, who Remus had never seen before. 

So here the potion had been developed that had been tested on him in Azkaban after it had killed other werewolves in untold trials. And here they tested continued forcible normalizers on part-human children. They would make something else to sustain vampires that was not human blood; they would make it so Merfolk could walk on land; they would dull the seduction and the transformation of kelpies and Veela. But it would not make them wizards… 

Snape and the Ministry man corralled the children and ushered them inside. They walked in small groups and some of them were obliged to assist one another. For the first time Remus saw the sigil embroidered on the breast fold of their robes: an ornate cochineal calligraphic letter C. 

They had not done this to him because of what they thought he had done because they were doing the same to these children who had done nothing. They had done it because of what he was. So they had wanted to do it since the very beginning. And they had been biding their time, and they had been waiting for an excuse. 

He wondered if Dumbledore had brought him to Hogwarts age eleven understanding one day the child that was Remus would create entirely on accident a rationale for forcible assimilation at any cost. He wondered if there had been a prophesy and he wondered if Dumbledore had known all along that he was innocent. After all he had refused to answer that particular question of Remus’s after the fourth trial. If Dumbledore had instructed the Ministry to bring Greyback to testify. If he had persuaded the jurors. If he had persuaded Sirius. All for the greater good. 

The wolf’s nose touched his hand again and its soft eyes were very sad. Snape and the Ministry man and the children were gone from the dock and the mouth of the bunker again seethed darkness. _We must move on again_. 

\--

He opened his eyes in a thick violent woods charging whisper upon whisper and though the canopy was so thick the sky was not visible he could tell it was day. It was the Forbidden Forest. Something was licking his face, but it was not the wolf thing, because its tongue was small and rough. When he opened his eyes and turned to it it skittered away for a moment and then it came close again and its eyes were big and bulbous yellow shot through with green. It was an altogether too-big mean and feral-looking ginger cat with its brushy tail held aloft like a flag or an exclamation point. 

The ghost of resonance he could still feel suffuse through his whole self such like he had never felt in the Forest before so he assumed it must be the cat. Perhaps the wolf thing had assumed another form. He sat up and it knocked its head against his ankles and then his hand. Its fur was matted and tangled with burrs but when he tried to pull them out it hissed and glared. When it slipped back off into the brush he lay back down; he was dizzy with hunger and he ached, but in another minute the cat appeared again and cocked its head at him expectantly; it must have been magic, or else perhaps it wasn’t really a cat. 

“Fine,” said Remus. He wondered where it was going to take him now. Certainly Hogwarts was surrounded by Dementors and such it would be unsafe to leave the Forest. When he struggled to his feet he had to lean against a tree for a moment before the blackness cleared from his vision and as he did the cat wound encouragingly around his feet. So long since he had touched anything soft but moss. So long since anything even the smallest life had treated him like someone kind. He stood finally, swaying, and the cat rubbed the cuff of his jeans and his torn bloody sock where it had slipped down in rolls toward the dumpstered loafers in which he had spent a month running. The sole, the soul, _Rubber Soul_ , he remembered, had started to flap loudly when he walked. Once he had been nervous to be in this woods alone and once when he was about fifteen he had gotten away from Sirius and James and the rat in the full moon night and he had woken up lost and aching and wandless and muddy with grist in his teeth and the sounds and shadows from the brush and the mist vivid in the dawn had spooked him and he remembered watching TV movies reenacting horrific Muggle hiking deaths with his parents sometimes on summer holidays, and his father would comment with things like “Drowning my arse… Kelpie signature if I’ve ever seen one…” As though Remus, sitting next to him, miserable in his bandages in the oppressive heat, were not also one of that same ilk whose nature tempted them to lie in wait in the woods and the glens for unsuspecting and unlucky passersby to seduce into possession or death or madness… Anyway then James had shown up, the stag that was James, though the rustling of him in the brush had nearly given Remus a heart attack, and they walked back together toward the Shack, where the rat, who was a human rat, looked customarily pallid and approaching the end of his wits, and Sirius was pacing on the threadbare carpet biting his nails, which were already bloody. And anyway now — eighteen years later — Remus could not summon a ghost of fear; what ever else came out of these woods he had survived worse. “Lead on,” he told the cat. 

He was not certain how long they walked but when he felt a chill in the mist and the darkness he tried a warming charm and found that impossibly it worked. He had never had much of a knack for wandless magic so perhaps it was the cat, or else it was the ghost of resonance sifting like gold dust in both of them. He tried to remember if a thing like this was possible and could not. In the vast tangled greenery he followed the bottlebrush tail held high and sometimes there were rustlings or shadows or whispers from the trees around but he paid no mind to them and they moved on again. 

When the trees began thinning he felt somewhere the soul-deep tugging of Dementors not far away and he stopped in his tracks but the cat turned to him with an expression of utter contempt. “I just last night got away from a pack of them,” he said to the cat. “I don’t want to see any more for a while.” 

The cat’s face said, too bad. But it feinted a little to the North around the treeline as if to appease him. Through the glade he could see Hagrid’s cabin now, and his patch of overlarge vegetables, and a corral of hippogriffs for some reason, sleeping like ostriches with their heads tucked under their wings against the morning light. Beyond the hut the grounds and the Quidditch pitch stretching up to the loch, and beyond that the castle indistinct still in the heavy wet haze… Remus could feel the wards on it: somewhere there was silver in the ground. So they had brought back the ancient defenses; if they had it meant there were no part-human students at Hogwarts anymore. Many disparate threads began to weave together in his mind into a kind of tapestry and he felt that wide-eyed wildness he had called madness start to feel altogether less like madness. 

The cat led him around the edge of the forest toward the castle’s far towers which were pressed up against the ridge of trees. Very suddenly he knew where they were going; it was like a ton of bricks swung into his gut. “Cat,” he whispered, “I can’t do this. Not right now.” 

It just looked at him with that contemptuous face, and it kept up its nimble trotting around the high roots. There was no compulsion in following it but still he did. Every step was like into a very strong wind, or against water, like throwing himself against a brick wall, and his hands were trembling, and he felt like he would vomit, or perhaps he would weep, or perhaps both, because after all he had been doing a lot of both lately, and when he lagged too far behind the cat waited impatiently for him to catch up. Finally after however many eternities they came around to the back of the castle where the Forest pressed up tight and close to the structure like its own moat. They would not be able to get altogether so close, because there were Dementors not far, and there was silver in the ground. But the cat lead Remus in the shadows toward the edge of the trees. Then it stopped him, and gingerly he knelt in the loam and the brush, and the cat rubbed its face against the crease of his jeans at his folded knee. 

From somewhere was music — from the castle was music and music he almost recognized but he knew he had not heard before. 

“How can I how can I how can I make my body shed around your metal scars…” 

The cat looked up at him expectantly. Like, how far have you come — how much have you lived, so that you could live this? 

As though some abstraction of memory would come out of it like a vault or a locket opened — as though it were some kind of keystone in his shattered mind for all the time this had been the only good thing he could remember that had ever happened to him, as though with this everything would fall into place, like pieces of a broken artifact, and he would be put back together and reassembled stronger than he had been before, and all of this would be possible, and he could be forgiven, and he could forgive himself. 

He peered around the trees and up into the high window with its glass and shutters thrown open unto the forest and the autumn breeze, it was like tearing off a bandaid or his entire skin, and the shadow came and went from it, and then at last the whole being, Sirius, cigarette hand first, smoke spiraling from the tiny red ember. 


	12. Chapter 12

**Hogwarts**   
_ December 1994 _

For the fourth year in a row Dumbledore had consigned Sirius to chaperone in the gardens and courtyards during the Yule Ball, where many students would use clandestine warming charms or bluebell flames to create a cozy enough environment to get to second base even in the blizzard which was customarily raging. “Just make sure no one gets pregnant, Sirius,” Dumbledore had instructed, not looking up over the golden wire of his glasses as he perused the Prophet. The cleverer of the students of course would take assorted secret passageways out of the Great Hall and sneak back into their deserted dormitories or adjacent classrooms for trysting purposes; it was only the stupid, drunk, or raveningly lustful who would attempt the courtyard — which meant, of course, a non-negligible amount. This winter, Sirius had about one spell a day’s worth of magic to his name, and it was fairly guaranteed the Dementors who prowled the property would be drawn like moths to all the emotion endemic to a dance for teens. As such he had abstained from using magic for a week leading up to the event, he had asked Pomona to create the bluebell flames for him, and he had not had a single drink, which he customarily did preceding this task, for fear it would dull his instincts. 

Inside a terrible grunge band was playing, and as such a few kids had come out for snowball fights or to “walk,” including Taylor Montcalm and Riley Song, who at first were holding hands, but who let go quickly when they saw Sirius. “How’d you get saddled with this gig,” said Taylor. Incredibly, impossibly, no doubt under Riley’s influence, she was extremely stoned. He could smell that they were wearing the same perfume, something like a burnt-sugar caramel. 

“I don’t think the old man likes me all that much,” Sirius told them. “Anyway I’m glad I’m not inside because this music is horrible.” 

“It’s Sanderson’s cousin’s band,” Riley said, and Sirius made a face. “They had some fun ‘50s records on earlier, though.” 

“Patsy Cline, and Elvis…” The girls nodded. Taylor had snuck her arm around Riley’s waist in a way she likely thought Sirius didn’t notice. “They played the same kind of stuff when I was in school. I actually think it’s Minerva’s collection.” 

“Holler for us if it comes back on, will you?” 

“Course I will.” He didn't have the heart to call after them to keep it above the belt when they slipped away into the snow. Riley’s warming charm glowed around them like a pale halo and she had slung her own arm over Taylor’s shoulders and their faces were pressed together closely and he saw them laughing together in symphonic tandem. 

He wandered through the courtyard and the gardens in the gathering storm and broke up a few amorous couples (once, a group of three almost certainly on ecstasy); snow had started to collect on their cloaks and in their hair and they looked like abstract statues of obscure gods and goddesses carved in the round and dynamic in their gentle movement. They were wreathed in the tender glow of their warming charms and part of Sirius was loath to disturb them but another part reminded him Sanderson refused to help students brew Miscarriage Mixes and if they weren’t seventeen they couldn’t purchase bottles of the stuff at the drugstore in Hogsmeade. 

“Fucking puritanical policies,” he muttered to himself as he advanced across the garden toward two Gryffindors he had stopped in their tracks at least three times in the last hour. “They’re going to do it anyway at some juncture…” 

At least he himself had had the dignity and common sense to fuck outside only when it was warm. Maybe once or twice it had been rather cold but they both had good warming charms and it definitely hadn’t been snowing. Once it had been raining, which had been rather nice. He was on shrooms, Remus was nominally “sitting,” despite the fact he was more than a little stoned, to make sure Sirius didn’t jump off something, and they were on the top of the Astronomy tower, which was really the best place at Hogwarts to do anything illicit as it was rarely patrolled by Filch or anyone and the classes up there were only at very specific times and the only danger you’d run into was being walked in on by other couples after the same private spot. Which had happened to Sirius with Dorcas Meadowes in the brief period they were both feigning heterosexuality, but never with Remus, and luckily not on the day it rained. Remus was meant to be asking him a series of questions that would help him in his note-taking for the project (the notes, of course, were rarely legible), but it was April, and the rain had a sort of warm carnal lifeness to it, like all around them in the hidden hollows animals were fucking, because it was the time of year to fuck. The flowers were fucking, Sirius remembered saying. They were fucking each other with bees by proxy. The movement of birds was a kind of hypnotic mating ritual… 

With the rain on the stone warmth steamed up from it, from the trees and the grounds below in pale sheets of haze. Remus had abandoned the notes, which he had put under an impenetrable charm in a corner with his own schoolbooks to keep them dry. Suddenly he couldn't look at anything anymore. The color was too much and he put his head in Remus’s lap and closed his eyes and Remus traced with one finger the shell of his ear. 

Finally he sort of got that Talking Heads lyric, “It’s not love which is my face which is a building which is on fire — ” 

“How much is really free will by that logic,” Remus said, but his voice sounded very far away, and Sirius could tell his eyes were closed. “What’s the point of pretending we’re not animals — how much happens because we have no credence for history and not much long-term memory — we keep making the same mistakes over and over and those mistakes are the same mistakes humans have made over and over since the beginning of time motivated mostly by the same couple things, you know, love, sex, fear, humiliation, mythology — like prehistoric almost animal feelings, and everything is just urges, like a dance of urges, all to keep our species living, right?” 

Sirius opened his eyes and regretted it so he closed them again. “You don’t think we exist for — more better bigger than that?” 

“I don’t know,” said Remus, “I’m not sure.” 

He was tangling his hands up in Sirius’s hair like yarn, but then he stopped, and Sirius felt like shaking up through his very bones that he wanted to say something like, maybe _you_ do. Stuff like this was gutting and infuriating in equal measure. Sirius opened his eyes, which he still regretted, and he sat up, which he regretted even more; everything was spinning, his nose was almost touching Remus’s nose, and Remus’s breath smelled like Earl Grey tea, and the rest of him smelled like dust, and it was raining — raining, raining. Far away across hill and vale and glen and tarn it thundered and the sound spread over the whole world like butter and it vibrated up through Sirius’s spine. The very sloppy blowjob he gave Remus immediately following seemed divinely mandated — 

Then the memory snatched away and fell and shattered, and it skittered and skipped through itself like a bad cassette, and he knew where it was going, because he could smell the metallic water in the room at the Hotel Rome. He tried to pull himself up out of it but it was sticky like tar or a glue trap and it had a cold fist around him and it held. He knew his eyes were open but they were almost unseeing — blurs of white and black, snow and shadows and cloaks torn about the hems of them, and in his head was an echo of screaming, but he did not know whose; he was twenty years old, and he watched the Mark go up over a row of houses in Peckham, and when he arrived there some of them were still alive, and he was alone, and between them there were too many wounds for him to heal with his wand, or to hold shut with his hands, and it felt like his mind floated away from him… and when he got home Remus put him in the bathtub, and cleaned his hands with harsh soap and finally with magic, until the blood came out from under his nails, and they didn’t speak, and he himself was crying and for a while Remus looked like he would but he did not. He rested his temple on Sirius’s bent-up knee and closed his eyes. The bathwater was an unpretty and scary green-brown with the blood and the bad pipes… and the faucet leaked, drip drip drip, and the water was still, and it was getting cold. Remus was breathing ponderously and for a moment Sirius suspected he might have fallen asleep. At least I love him, he thought. At least I have this, even if this is the only thing I have… 

“ _Expecto Patronum_ ,” he cried; it didn’t work. Not enough remaining in the barest well of him for a spell with that sort of weight. There were some host of them bearing down on him imperious like the invisible twine that held Damocles’ sword and they were twice his height and they were the very feeling of darkness, or of Darkness, they were the texture of evil and they were the inside of the earth, and the space between stars — 

He heard two other voices repeat the spell, young, female; a flash of light the creatures only flinched from. Then weeping, weeping and sobbing all around himself and a single high pitchy scream like a tuning bell, whose it was he didn’t know, he couldn’t say, perhaps it was his own. They were so close now he was not sure how he still drew breath. It was as if they held his throat in a tight vise. As if the only thing he had ever known and ever felt in his life was horror, blood and pain, endless fear, fear like a rope coiling, fear like a rime of ice in the recesses of his very soul — 

Then a sudden quicksilver flash, sinuous and impossible, wet golden ectoplasm brilliant and spangled upon the snow. 

\--

The world redeveloped. In his years teaching Sirius’s ears had sharpened and attuned to the sound of students weeping and all around him he heard it from the bushes — a relieved and trembly orchestra of sobbing. A fucking buzzkill on Yule Ball night, he thought dazedly. Gingerly he sat up; his bluebell flames had spilled and disappeared and his hands burned with cold. The creatures of course were gone but the snow was coming faster and heavier than it had been before. The void of magic in his chest was almost painful. And in front of him in the snow the warm golden blur that had saved perhaps their lives and at least their souls had materialized. 

In his peripheral he saw Riley help Taylor to her feet. Their pretty leather shoes were sliding on the snow and both their faces were streaked with tears and the snow and the wind and the running and the magic had mussed their makeup and their hair from their neat arrangements. “Professor — ” Riley croaked. 

He himself could not tear his eyes from the eyes of the russet golden wolf who had chased away the Dementors. It sat on its haunches and studied him with a friendly and intelligent sympathy. Then it looked to the girls. Taylor had her wand drawn and had dredged up all her not-inconsiderable Quidditch bulk and Riley was holding her wrist. “What is it,” she said slowly. 

The wolf looked back to Sirius. “Patronus,” he said. 

“It’s golden,” said Taylor. She seemed rather dazed. 

“Yes.” 

“Can you feel — Sirius.” He looked to Riley; she had never called him by his first name before. “Resonance.” 

How many times had he seen it before and it just a little different. It was silver wandstuff or it was reddish and real and there was a real person inside it. He reached out with his mind as though to any other artifact or landmark and when he touched the magic of it he flinched away. Part of it was Remus, incontrovertibly. A signature he would know in death. Another part of it was something very much else, very old and very strange. Something about it cold and mineral, like underground water, like buried stone. Alkaline taste on the tongue. Ancient magic scarcely understood by contemporary scholars; Sirius had read the literature. 

It wanted to take a step toward him but it did not. It stood on its four legs and looked once more at Sirius and then again at the girls. Then it turned tail and quickly disappeared into the blizzard. 

Sirius turned to Taylor and Riley and he sensed a perhaps deeply inadvisable covenant made between the three of them. Together they corralled the other students who were wet and tearful and snotty and shaking and herded them all inside where the horrible music abruptly ceased. Sirius was struck that in a very adjacent world there had been no such violent suffering. Someone dropped a tumbler containing a no-doubt-spiked bit of fluorescent punch and it broke loudly upon the floor. Pomfrey and Dumbledore and the Heads of House were summoned and Sirius took credit for the Patronus and an urgent owl was dispatched to the Ministry on the subject. The matter was considered resolved and students were sent reluctantly to bed at what some considered a grievously early hour for the Yule Ball, but Sirius walked as fast as he could manage to his chambers and made himself a cup of hot chocolate with chili and cinnamon, threw his windows open upon the Forest, stared into the blizzard until he felt he would go mad with snowblindness, and at last set to researching. 

\--

The still and cold January evening before students were due to come back from Christmas holidays Sirius forewent dinner in the Great Hall, preemptively chugged one of the single-serving pain potions he’d nicked from the hospital wing (they were meant to help teenage girls through their menstrual cramps) and before he could think about the exact ramifications of what he was doing in too much detail he braced himself and put the dog on. It was seldom he attempted this with a dearth of magic because the transition was rather not swift nor easy; he could feel every stretching and every shrinking and every bone rubbing against another and the flesh rearranging and the skin growing a pelt out of itself and by the time it was over he lay on his office floor crying. The dog’s weak and soft whimpering was so pathetic it made his own heart clench to hear it echoed in his ears. 

The first time he had tried it — in Oxford in the early ‘80s — he had realized with a numb horror it was probably what Remus felt every full moonrise. Consciousness put through a kind of pasta wringer — squeezed and siphoned into a new body all of which was dearly wrong. It kept hurting for a while after the initial transformation, and then it was like a blister or something he could put almost to the back of his mind, and then when he wanted to put his real skin back on it was a little harder; the first time he had panicked, thinking he would be trapped as a dog until his magic came back. It was just that with its different quieter mind it could not conceive of wanting to go back when it knew how badly it would hurt. He wondered if lycanthropy functioned the same; Remus had never remembered regaining his human form. 

When he could get to his feet he nosed out his office door and down the wide staircase keeping to the shadows and through the hallways dusted in their corners with bright green pine needles scattered from the castle’s seasonal decor. The students had gone to their dormitories or the library to no doubt get started at last on their homework and the rumble of voices from the Great Hall when Sirius passed was decidedly deeper, belonging to staff and teachers. He did not look inside; rather he trotted swiftly past the door and out into the deep snow. 

Paths had been cut with magic to the lake and the Quidditch pitch, the greenhouses, and Hagrid’s; the grass underneath was dull with ice and slippery. The Dementors he knew roamed the grounds were like a dull ache somewhere in his gut, an awareness, but not an effect. He had recalled the eerie non-coincidence that had gotten Remus out of Azkaban — Dementors could not sense animals’ minds. Toward the lake two were floating close to one another, colluding, and others were solitary and vigilant toward the treeline like a smattering of particularly horrible scarecrows. The cold was sharp and biting and the sky was so clear and endless it looked ravaged by stars. 

Down the path to Hagrid’s he went until he bounded off into the snow to keep out of the range of Fang’s bloodhound nose, and at last he slipped between two of the Dementors like their own sort of dark menhirs into the silent wild womb of the forest. The trees thickened considerably about a hundred yards in and the air seemed to warm and the smell of it changed and there was hardly snow upon the ground so thick was the evergreen canopy and the tangled vines. Only dregs of moonlight snatched through and Sirius navigated mostly by smell of which there were snatches he recognized from his nocturnal adolescent wanderings in this wood — here had been horses (centaurs or unicorns, perhaps kelpies — thestrals had a different sort of smell) and here had been hawks, owls, mink and fisher, and here had been a cat, and here at last a wolf. When he caught the scent he stopped and he sent his consciousness into the earth in search of the resonance but there was none. 

There was none whatsoever in the Forest. This he knew for sure; if there was, it would have been a hell of a lot easier to take his students on field trips the last ten years. Remus would have had to have gotten a hold of resonance someplace else and brought it with him, which as far as Sirius knew was not possible, especially for someone whom multiple sources had testified to have gone almost completely feral — whose mind, body, and soul had been sucked on like a hard candy for twelve years. Unless perhaps he had some sort of artifact with him, Sirius reasoned, but that would leave traces, and the wolf Patronus’s resonance had been different; it was not the functional sort put in an object, it was the warm and alien accompanying presence endemic to resonant landmarks. 

He followed the scent through the brush and the loam and the thick tree trunks and across frozen streambeds, through the tracks of unfamiliar footprints and through unfamiliar smells, until at last he saw movement, just for a moment in the brush, and he froze. But it was only the cat he had sniffed out earlier, bushy-tailed and red, a student’s pet gone back to nature as Sirius knew many did, who eyed him contemptuously. It stood its ground even when he growled and its tail began to shift side to side apprehensively like the broken hands of a clock or a hypnotist’s instruments. When he took but a single step closer it hissed and spat. Its back was arched high and it showed all its small sharp teeth and when it swiped at the dog’s face with sharp yellowish claws Sirius gave up and retreated. 

Of course he had lost the scent of the wolf when he regained his bearings. He backtracked and wandered for hours but did not catch it again, nor any human scent and certainly no Remus scent (paper, ink, dust, blood, cannabis, Earl Grey, his lemon soap, his mint toothpaste: but perhaps, Sirius thought, a snatch of fear, he smelled entirely different now) and eventually the blister-like pain of being transformed without enough magic started to frustrate him more than he could bear. He trotted out of the woods and back up toward the castle; the deep snow cooled the hurt of it some; he shook the damp and the ice from himself in the entrance hall and heard the portraits complain. Then he crept up the back stairs to his office with an ear peeled for Filch, feeling fifteen years old again but for a great deal more disillusionment. 

In his chambers he went right into his bathroom and lay on the tile floor and closed his eyes. It was nearly like forcing oneself to vomit. He pressed into it, like against some flexible membrane, and it protested, so he pressed himself harder; he felt his stomach twist first, then the rest of the pain, somewhat belated, ripping up, flaying like a red-hot knife under all his skin to turn it inside out. 

He didn’t fully make it to the toilet to vomit and he lay pressing his pounding head against the cold tile for perhaps an hour before he could summon the energy even to clean up the mess. His mind was so foggy with pain and exhaustion that a jolt of momentary terror possessed him that it was still the dog’s. 

In his bedroom window it was dawn before he drew tight the shades and collapsed into the unmade bed. 

Facts indisputable: The Patronus that had saved his and Riley’s and Taylor’s very souls had been Remus’s and so Remus was there. He was somewhere in that wood and he could not remain at large in there forever without being sniffed out. The old thread of doubt was thick as yarn and golden and his head felt tangled in it. Why would Remus save him if Remus wanted him dead? But then he remembered Charles Bronson’s revenge on Henry Fonda in _Once Upon a Time in the West_. 

He and Riley as of yet had found no history and no precedent. 

It was the worst physical pain he had ever suffered to put the dog on when he had not enough magic for it. Yet it was no worse than the years. It was the years turned backwards and inside-out brought back upon him in a moment’s knives. 

Years. He would find Remus and hold him down in the loam and demand to hear the words from his own mouth. Every alternative was unacceptable. If they took his soul with no answering for it Sirius would kill them all. He would find the plug that drained them and he would pull it and he would burn the place where they came from to ashes. 

So now he himself felt rather felt like Charles Bronson in _Once Upon a Time in the West_. This was his own very strictly cast and managed revenge performance and it would be executed as such. And no matter the pain he would have to seek until it had been executed. Otherwise who could say what would happen in the end of it? 

Logically he could not sustain this. Human beings were not supposed to face all this, he thought, but he had been thinking that since late in 1978, and it had never gone away, and he was still alive. 

He slept all day and dreamed he was in an old Western rather like _the Searchers_ in which he sought somebody who when all was said and done he could not stand the sight of. They were blinding in the sun’s refraction and they spoke with a terrible beauty like an endless roll of thunder. At dusk he woke to a flurry of knocks upon his door; it was Riley with an armful of photocopied journals she had brought back from assorted magical research libraries in London and Seoul. They combed through it all for a bit in silence (she took the Korean text) and finally he had to dismiss her for all his head was pounding. He passed out again without brushing his teeth and woke up the next day at noon having slept through both his weekly Patronus lessons with Harry and his fifth year class, with his mouth tasting like a small animal had made a nest in it. 

That day after the seventh year class Riley stuck behind again; Taylor had not yet returned from her family’s annual Christmas trip to Lampedusa, she explained, and she was bored and curious. “And jealous, I guess,” she said after a long enough while, already twenty pages deep in one of the Korean journals. “I’ll never get to go to Lampedusa with her and her family.” 

“Have her take you to the property another time of year,” said Sirius. “Trust me when I say the last thing you want to do is go on a Mediterranean vacation with a multigenerational gang of blood purist Slytherins.” 

“It’s the symbol of it that matters to me,” she said. “It feels like she’s ashamed of me.” 

“She’s ashamed of her family and a little of herself, before you.” 

“I know that. I wish I could like, really believe it; loving someone makes you feel really stupid things.” 

Like this, Sirius almost said; this is a stupid thing, this is a really stupid thing. He had laid awake consumed with guilt over the Christmas holidays concerned Riley would be punished for aiding and abetting should the truth eventually come to light and he had in fact intended on telling her he’d decided to put the matter to rest and didn’t need her help but he hadn’t had the heart. He reasoned it wasn’t far from the project she was working on — mapping the depth of resonance through trances — and certainly less frightening than when she would seem to fall asleep in her chair in study halls and spend two hours hardly breathing, entombed in the very essence of magic. 

They read through the papers for another hour or so — they were all obscure and sometimes severely outdated theory journals regarding resonance transfer — before Riley said, “You know something you aren’t telling me.” 

“What makes you say that?” 

“You went out there looking for it the other night, didn’t you?” 

It was rare he was embarrassed in front of a student; he looked her in the eye to pretend he wasn’t. “I did.” 

“Why did you do that?” 

“Well — maybe it’s best if you just don’t know.” Her brow furrowed tightly at that. Then she stood up, her chair grating against the hardwoods, and she snatched the journal he was reading from his hands and stacked all the paperwork messily and set to shoving it in her bag. “Riley…” 

“I just want to help you but I get it if you just want me to read all this esoteric bullshit and report on the highlights so you can do the cool and interesting work like investigating in the Forest in the middle of the night — ” 

“It would be dangerous for you to know,” he told her. “It would be dangerous for you to come in the Forest with me and it would be dangerous for you to know.” 

She fixed him with a stare; there was a kind of smile in it she was trying to keep from reaching her mouth. Then she sat again, and she leaned conspiratorially over the table. “Does it have to do with Lupin?” she asked, as though it were a fun curiosity, which he supposed to her it was. “I was thinking it might, you know, it was a wolf, and they say he’s after something here.” 

“He and I were friends at school,” said Sirius. “It’s certainly his Patronus. I’d seen it before. The issue at hand is, Azkaban is said to drain a wizard of his power. He wouldn’t be able to cast any sorts of spells on his own.” 

“So the resonance — he could have used a stone circle or an artifact.” 

“They told me his brain’s completely fucking fried, like, there isn’t any human left to him.” 

“Perhaps they lied,” she said, like it was obvious. “So that people would think he isn’t dangerous. Or that he’s dangerous in a different sort of way. Or so they can keep up the illusion that Azkaban works, like as a generalized penal system…” 

“I don’t know how he would have gotten his hands on an artifact,” Sirius said, “and you can’t take the resonance of a stone circle with you — not in any meaningful way. Impressions, perhaps.” 

Riley watched past Sirius out the window into the evening and the snow; he understood she was thinking. At last she snapped her fingers a few times. “Kadir Aswad’s project, two years ago.” 

“Resonant objects in the treatment of magic loss disorders,” Sirius remembered. 

“Yes, he was right and it does work, not with Sudden Onset Squibness and not with the weirder ones like Ghawdex but other kinds of magic loss: Dunn’s Sickness, Heller-Andrews, even Gradual Onset Squibness I suppose they’ve had some success…” 

“I just don’t see how he could have gotten something — ”

“What if Kadir’s theory applies to landmarks too? His process was, he had folks who were losing magic try some spells, hold an artifact and try the same spells, and then put it down and try the spells again. And with most of them, it was strong when they were holding the artifact, and it was strong afterward, too. He concluded that magic rehearsal with a resonant object has a therapeutic effect. So what if — ” 

“He tried a spell at a landmark, and then it stayed with him.” 

“Exactly,” said Riley. Her eyes were glittering the way they sometimes did when he woke her up from a particularly productive trance. “Some parts of it are still a mystery. Like, I don't think ectoplasmic stuff turned gold for most of Kadir’s subjects but then they weren’t attempting spells as challenging as the Patronus. But I think that’s where it comes from at the very least.” 

“He did have a good feel for resonance back when we were in school but he never got past the fifth year class.” 

Riley nodded. “You know third year I was really stoned usually and all my friends hated me and so I read his werewolf oral history.” 

“Pince says sometimes the weirder students do.” 

“Yes, well certainly I am one of them.” She cracked a smile. “Reading it made me doubt a lot. I’ve wondered if he really did it all.” 

“There was — testimony, under Veritaserum…” 

“Veritaserum shouldn’t be admissible in court,” Riley shot back. “The Ministry lawyers use leading questions. And they make sure defendants can’t secure representation of their own. It’s worse than the American judicial system. I saw a documentary.” 

“It’s rare we’re even worse at something than the Americans,” said Sirius, to keep from telling Riley he too doubted, that he had spent thirteen years doubting, and yet there was but one shred of physical evidence that could not be denied, that stirred in his blood and his bones, in his very source-code data… “I suppose it’s this and colonialism.” 

Of course Riley caught the deflection; he watched her search his face for clues or answers as though she had never seen it before. At last she looked back down to her papers; she must have drawn whatever conclusion she needed, but he didn’t ask what it was. 

\--

Despite Sirius’s nighttime wanderings in the dog’s body — which got rather easier as the weather warmed and the tables turned on his magic — they did not hear news of Remus’s Patronus again until April, when Taylor came up to Sirius at the faculty table at dinner. Dumbledore, Minerva, Kingsley, and Poppy were notably absent from proceedings and Sirius could sense the students abounding with whispers on the subject. “Students were halted by Dementors on the grounds this afternoon,” Taylor explained. She was the Slytherin Head Girl and thus privy to gossip substantiated and non. “They’ve been getting quite brave, you know, quite feisty, those beasts have.” 

“Are the students alright?” 

“Yes, yes, they were, um — ” She watched Sanderson, her head of house, slowly settle his immense bulk into a seat a few places down from Sirius. “They were rescued by a ghost, they said. A golden wolf.” 

Of course Sirius was called that night to Dumbledore’s office, where he was offered a peppermint he thought it would likely be best to refuse. He wasn’t sure Dumbledore was above soaking sweets in Veritaserum on occasions such as this one. “Have you heard about today’s incident?” the old man asked, tenting his fingers. There was a thin rime of dust on his otherwise impeccable desk and the phoenix eyed the portraits curiously from its roost. 

Sirius feigned surprise and was let out after an hour’s casual interrogation. Post-haste he went back to his rooms and put the dog on and trotted out toward the woods but he didn’t get more than halfway down the path to Hagrid’s when he heard a voice from nowhere say, “What’s _that_?” 

The dog’s nose could smell them even under their Invisibility Cloak. It was Harry, Ron, and Hermione. 

“It’s a dog,” said Hermione, at the same time Ron blurted, clearly panicked, “It’s a Grim!” 

“Did it come from the castle?” 

“I didn’t see where it came from. Black dogs prefigure death, Harry; didn’t you listen in Divination?” 

“ _You_ listen in Divination?” Hermione asked, clearly shocked. She had come to Sirius when she dropped out of Trelawney’s class to ask about enrolling in fifth year magical theory and he had had to tell her it wouldn’t be possible to catch up as it was halfway through the semester. He had had to improvise and offer to enroll her in her fourth year, which he was sure he was going to regret. 

“The moral is maybe we shouldn’t be out here after all — ” 

“It’s just a dog, Ron, this is more important.” 

“What if it means we will find Lupin and he’ll kill us all?” 

It was always something with these fucking kids, Sirius thought, one because he was clearly the spawn of James and Lily, the second because he was clearly the spawn of Arthur and Molly, and the third because she was almost certainly too smart for her own good. He found he could hardly fault them for it though they made him dearly nervous near on every second of his life and even overhearing shreds of whispers of their conversations in the halls or at dinner made him want to sit them down and give them the speech he had wished during the long war years he had been given: Your lives are very valuable to very many people and you only have one, _be fucking careful_! 

“It’s just a dog,” said Hermione again. “It looks sweet. And besides I thought we weren’t looking for Lupin; we were looking for the passageways.” 

Even fucking worse, Sirius thought. In the summer all the passages inside the castle had been closed but the Hogwarts staff hadn’t done much about the ones on the grounds, as two of them were deep in the Forest and the third was under the Willow. He had thoroughly spelunked all three in the past few months to no avail, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were all clear at the present moment.

“What if he’s in those passageways?” Ron asked. 

“We’ll see him on the map,” said Harry. Rustle of paper. Then, of course, obviously, because he very much should have seen this coming, Harry said (brutal nostalgia, nostalgia like being immersed in an ice bath, like a knife through his ribs, like almost-James’s voice out of fifteen years of bloody history), “I solemnly swear I am up to no good.” 

They would tap the map, him and James and Peter, and take a look through the maze of hallways toward the front doors, and they would crouch low to keep their ankles from showing under the Invisibility Cloak, and together they would run through the hallways and halfway across the grounds they would change. Sirius would carry the cloak and the map in his mouth and hide them in the tree’s shifting roots and together they would slip into the earth and his blood would be a little up and his heart felt firing on all cylinders and James’s huge stupid antlers scraped gouges in the walls. At the end of it the wolf would be waiting for them and if they were early enough it would only have chewed itself up at the paws where Sirius knew — he always thought they shared some thought-thing like a strand of Pensieve thread strung up between them — its skin and bones felt tight and strange. He would scrap with it a bit and then they would go outside and the air was fresh and cool, and the wind seemed to speak, and in the wood the shadows would watch them and then they would move away, and he felt like they owned the world, or at least this corner of it, and that nothing could touch them, and that what existed between them was the stuff of magic itself, and it was realer and larger than anything — and so when it was all torn down on him it had been rather like a tiny apocalypse, swarming imploding heat death, massive as a dying star, and what it left behind inside itself was a stretching black vacancy, data-scrambling black hole, and whatever opened up beyond it he still hadn't seen, and he could not even imagine what it would look like… 

For two hours he tailed them out of sight around the grounds until he heard their voices moving back up toward the castle, and then he slipped once more into the woods. 

\--

In June everything felt stretched tight like an old scab upon a nearly-healed wound — his magic, his students’ patience, Harry and Ron and Hermione’s curiosity, the Ministry’s rabid search for Remus — and Sirius knew it could not remain this way for long. He woke up in the mornings and thought of Yeats: “The center cannot hold…” Harry had started to casually interrogate Sirius with regard to his Hogwarts days during their Patronus lessons, Dumbledore came by once a week at least, sometimes accompanied by Kingsley, to pretend they weren’t searching Sirius’s rooms whilst indeed searching his rooms, an auspicious seven students broke down in tears during class and another four did so in his office hours, and the Prophet had begun to report completely salacious bullshit insisting Remus had fled to America and was being harbored by their Ministry. “We get closer to extradition every day,” a source close to the Auror Department had allegedly said. Sirius accompanied Riley to present her findings at a conference of magical theory scholars at Oxford, where she and Taylor had both been accepted into the graduate program; the committee was mostly elderly white men double Sirius’s age and thus nearly quadruple Riley’s, and after about an hour of questioning with regard to the validity of her methods she turned heel in her Doc Maartens and stormed out the door. After issuing a few apologies and explanations Sirius followed her and found her on the steps burning her admissions paperwork like some reluctant bourgeois hero of E.M. Forster’s. “I’m going to St. Andrews,” she said sharply, and they walked across campus to Floo back to Hogwarts. 

Most of his fifth year students passed the O.W.L. and all his seventh years passed the N.E.W.T. and on a breezy late afternoon he was settling in to read through their final papers with a grilled cheese sandwich and ice coffee nabbed from the kitchens when there was a flurry of knocking upon his office door. 

Of course it was Harry and Ron and Hermione, and Harry held a scrap of painfully familiar dirty parchment shaking just a bit in his trembling hand, and Hermione was looking more frazzled than usual, and even Ron’s pet rat, who had peeked its head out of Ron’s pocket momentarily then concealed itself again, seemed rather harried. 

“You’re not supposed to have pets in the corridors,” said Sirius to Ron in attempt to diffuse the mood. 

“He has to be with me,” Ron said with a harsh look at Hermione, who rolled her eyes. “Her mad cat terrorizes him. He’s losing his fur in patches…” 

“Crookshanks can’t help his nature,” said Hermione, crossing her arms. 

“There’s a problem,” said Harry, un-diffusing the mood, “can we talk to you?” 

Sirius invited them into his office and offered them ginger candy which they declined and at last Harry spread the map out upon his desk and woke it up. “Fred and George gave us this at the beginning of the year,” said Harry. “I can’t go to Hogsmeade so — it shows the secret passages. Of which all the ones in the castle have been closed.” 

“That was done this summer to keep the castle secure,” Sirius explained. 

“I thought so. Which is why we looked a bit further afield. There are some in the Forest and one under the Willow. Hermione extended the map a bit, because it didn’t go all the way into the Forest.” 

Sirius looked at the new edge of parchment cleverly spelled onto the old, marked with handwriting and a sketching style that was clearly Hermione’s. He was impressed with nearly everything she did but this was particularly incredible. It had taken him and James and Remus and Peter six months to figure out how to put up the interior walls; Hermione had put in trees which moved gently in an invisible wind, and running streams and mossy stones and silent swamps, and even tiny racing marks that said _Squirrel. Marmot. Chipmunk._ “Lovely spellwork,” he told her. 

“Thank you,” she said. “But do you see the problem?” 

On the edge of the forest he noticed at last was a dot labeled _Remus Lupin_. 

All Sirius could muster was “Oh.” 

“We just saw it now,” said Harry. “We were trying to see if the route was clear to the kitchens. To celebrate being done with schoolwork.” 

Sirius’s ears were ringing so mightily when he spoke it felt echoing inside his skull. “Right well, good on you bringing it to me.” 

“Dumbledore wasn’t in his office,” said Ron. His ears were red, but the rest of his face was very pale. His rat had peeked its nervous balding head out of his pocket. 

Things stitched together inside Sirius’s mind like a tapestry. The rat — and the cat in the woods hissing when he followed the scent of the wolf… “Her mad cat terrorizes him…” Sirius slid the map toward himself and traced a finger up toward the castle, toward the back tower and the fifth floor and toward his rooms, and in the tiny cluster of specks in the office he already thought he knew what he would see. 

Pure calm clarity — like dawn, like milk in tea. 

_Sirius Black. Harry Potter. Hermione Granger. Ron Weasley. Peter Pettigrew._

“Ron,” said Sirius carefully. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears. “Do you think I could see that rat of yours for a second?” 


	13. Chapter 13

**Hogwarts**   
_ June 1994 _

After the dog who carried the rat Harry and Ron and Hermione followed hunched like beggars under the pale silvery fabric of the Invisibility Cloak. They all froze at the rustle from the bushes but it was only Crookshanks who hissed and batted at the squirming life in the dog’s jaws before all three trotted off ever toward the forest. Harry heard Ron hiss something that started with “Bloody cat…” 

He could feel Hermione bristle. “Don’t you dare blame any of this on me,” she shot back. “Professor Black _took Scabbers_ and clearly — ”

“Shh,” said Harry, because at the naked seething edge of woods something moved. Not the Willow, which was close, standing guard — but something nearby and askance, human-shapedish, pale in the trees. 

The dog carrying the rat accompanied by the cat pursued closely by the trio invisible beneath the cloak approached the thing in the woods and the woods spat it out; it was a man. Or it was bones inside skin inside too-big clothes stained and tearing and its hair was wild, and its eyes were vivid bright and almost feral, and there was a horrible white scar across its face like a chalk carving in the dregs of daylight, so it was Remus Lupin. 

Hermione clapped her hand tightly over her mouth and even Ron stifled a squeak but Harry felt hypnotized or petrified or separated from himself and afloat in history turning on its endless spiraling gyre stretching to encompass all things into a kind of maelstrom — history and history and history ever for the replaying… history like a black hole. On the other cosmic end of it a rather disappointingly familiar unknown…

Lupin stepped forward from the woods cautiously and the dog sat on its haunches. The cat went to him and wound around his bare feet like a soft orange ribbon. “Crookshanks — ” Hermione only mouthed his name, but Harry could hear it. “Not him…” But Lupin was looking at the dog like he would look at a person, and he saw for the first time that the dog had Scabbers in its mouth. 

“Ahh,” Lupin said. His voice cracked and tore. “Well I’m glad you figured it out on your own.” 

He reached tentatively to pet the dog’s head as though he worried his hand would be bitten off. The fingers were like a skeleton’s and they trembled. The dog bowed its head to be scratched behind the ears and Lupin’s narrow pale mouth tightened and he knelt in the dew-wet grass and he embraced it. Like he would a person. In Harry’s mind certain things coalesced like a thin rime of ice. 

These were not animals — he was certain suddenly. He wasn’t yet sure how it could be. But they weren’t animals. 

When Lupin pulled back the dog pressed its nose against his ear. For a long moment he eyed the wiggling rat and it yearned away from him but the dog held it fast. Blood in the sunset seemed very bright upon the grass. Harry heard Ron’s tiny moan. 

“Perhaps,” Lupin said, then he coughed to strengthen his voice, “perhaps we should finish it.” The dog nodded perceptibly. Lupin’s kneecaps cracked like twigs when he stood. He was young but he rather looked ageless. Like a ghost — like some vital piece of him had been sucked away. He rested his hand on the dog’s head for just a moment. Then they followed the cat’s high brushy tail toward the shifting silent sentinel of the vengeful tree. 

**Author's Note:**

> i can't stress enough how thoroughly this whole series wouldn't have happened at all without [montparnasse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse), beta / midwife / cheerleader, etc.  
> [here on my tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/tagged/atomizer) are some reference points / inspiration bits for this series - join me! also, feel free to message me with regard to this story and/or call me out on anything i've gotten wrong.


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